Love for the Divine

A Compilation from the works of

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Love for the Divine

ISBN 978-81-7060-389-4

© All writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

are copyright of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

and have been reproduced here with their kind permission.

Cover Painting–Ms Priti Ghosh (Ashram Artist)

©2017 AuroPublications, Sri Aurobindo Society, Puducherry

www.aurosociety.org

Year of Publication 2017

Compilation done by Jamshed M Mavalwalla

Proof reading done by Archana Udaykumar and Puja

Cover done by Kavita Dutta

Help in making e-book by Shivakumar and Uttam Mondal

Foreword

All over the world, there is a growing interest in Spirituality and Yoga.  There is a search for the true meaning and purpose of life, for deeper solutions to the problems which confront us all, and how we can contribute to the evolutionary change and progress.

In this search, more and more persons are turning to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for guidance and enlightenment.  But in their voluminous literature, they do not know where to find the answers they are looking for.

In this regard the Mother has said,

“It is not by books that Sri Aurobindo ought to be studied but by subjects—what he has said on the Divine, on Unity, on religion, on evolution, on education, on self-perfection, on supermind, etc., etc.” (CWM 12: 206)

On another occasion she said:

“If you want to know what Sri Aurobindo has said on a given subject, you must at least read all he has written on that subject. You will then see that he seems to have said the most contradictory things. But when one has read everything and understood a little, one sees that all the contradictions complement one another and are organised and unified in an integral synthesis.” (CWM 16: 309-310)

While there are several compilations which are now available, many sincere spiritual seekers have felt the need of Comprehensive Compilations from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on specific subjects, where the contents are further organised into sub-topics, so that one can get all that one is looking for at one place.

These books are an effort to fulfill this need and thus help spiritual seekers in their journey and sadhana.  We hope these compilations will help us to get a greater mental clarity about a subject so that we can channel our efforts in the right direction. For Sri Aurobindo has written:

“It is always better to make an effort in the right direction; even if one fails the effort bears some result and is never lost.” (CWSA 29: 87)

We will be glad to get suggestions and feedback from the readers.

Vijay

Preface

With this book we are starting a new series of books on LOVE. The first book is ‘Love for the Divine’.

In order to facilitate clear understanding, similar to the earlier compilations, the following methods have been utilized: The quotations have been classified into captioned sections. There are 14 sections written in Roman numerals (I, II, III, IV, V, etc.). Under each section there are different sub sections which are numerically numbered as 1, 2, 3, etc.

The quotations in this compilation are taken from the volumes of the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) and the Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), Second Edition. Each quotation is followed by the book title, volume number and the page number it has been taken from.

While the passages from Sri Aurobindo are in the original English, most of the passages from the Mother (selections from her talks and writings) are translations from the original French. We must also bear in mind that the excerpts have been taken out of their original context and that a compilation, in its very nature, is likely to have a personal and subjective approach. A sincere attempt, however, has been made to be faithful to the vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Those who would like to go through the fuller text are advised to go through the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) and the Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), Second Edition.

The section headings and sub-headings have also been provided by the compiler to bring clarity on the selected topic. Also to emphasize certain portion in the quotations, the compiler has bold-faced some words.

I pray that this book may help the readers to intensify their love for the Divine.

Jamshed M Mavalwalla

Contents

I—Love Is …

II—What Is Love for the Divine

III—True Love

IV—What is not True Love

V—Pure and Perfect Love has to Get Rid of Their Earthy Elements

VI—To Refine and Purify the Grossness of love

VII—How to Love the Divine

VIII—How to Increase the Love for the Divine

IX—The Psychic Love

X—Love—Delight—Ananda

XI—Love—Oneness

XII—The Law of Love

XIII— Supramental Love

XIV—Other Quotations on Love

I—Love Is …

1. Love is self-giving

“Love is self-giving without asking anything in return.” (CWM 10: 282)

“To love is not to possess, but to give oneself.” (CWM 16: 173)

“And what is the first gesture of love? To give oneself, to serve. What is its spontaneous, immediate, inevitable movement? To serve. To serve in a joyous, complete, total self-giving.” (CWM 9: 50)

“Devotion: modest and fragrant, it gives itself without seeking for anything in return.” (CWM 14: 98)

“Devotional attitude: moderate and self-effacing, it gives remarkable fruit.” (CWM 14: 98)

2. Love is in its nature the desire to give oneself to others

“Love is in its nature the desire to give oneself to others and to receive others in exchange; it is a commerce between being and being. Physical life does not desire to give itself, it desires only to receive. It is true that it is compelled to give itself, for the life which only receives and does not give must become barren, wither and perish,—if indeed such life in its entirety is possible at all here or in any world; but it is compelled, not willing, it obeys the subconscious impulse of Nature rather than consciously shares in it. Even when love intervenes, the self-giving at first still preserves to a large extent the mechanical character of the subconscious will in the atom.” (CWSA 21: 217)

3. Love that is adoration has a spiritual force behind it

4. Love that is worship is at once an aspiration and a preparation

“All love, indeed, that is adoration has a spiritual force behind it, and even when it is offered ignorantly and to a limited object, something of that splendour appears through the poverty of the rite and the smallness of its issues. For love that is worship is at once an aspiration and a preparation: it can bring even within its small limits in the Ignorance a glimpse of a still more or less blind and partial but surprising realisation; for there are moments when it is not we but the One who loves and is loved in us, and even a human passion can be uplifted and glorified by a slight glimpse of this infinite Love and Lover.” (CWSA 23: 159)

5. If one wants to know what love is, one must love the Divine

“I have said that if one wants to know what love is, one must love the Divine. Then there is a chance of knowing what love is.” (CWM 6: 102)

6. The nature of love is a feeling or seeking for closeness and union

“The nature of bhakti is adoration, worship, self-offering to what is greater than oneself—the nature of love is a feeling or seeking for closeness and union. Self-giving is the character of both; both are necessary in the Yoga and each gets its full force when supported by the other.” (CWSA 29: 356)

“... it is indeed love which leads to Unity ...” (CWM 9: 51)

7. Love is the power by which union and harmony are worked out

“Here the union and harmony of the persistent individual and the persistent aggregate life become possible.—Love is the power by which this union and harmony are worked out; for love exists by the persistence of the individual and his conscious acceptance of the necessity and desire of interchange and self-giving.” (CWSA 13: 474)

“Consciousness is a state and a power.”

“Love is a force and an action.” (CWM 14: 118)

8. Love is a power of Divine’s consciousness and being

“Love is not a name of the Divine, it is a power of his consciousness and being.” (CWSA 29: 356)

9. Love is a yearning for beauty — Love is a seeker of Delight

“Love, too, is a yearning for beauty, .. Love is a child and a seeker of Delight …” (CWSA 24: 569–570)

“The general power of Delight is love and the special mould which the joy of love takes is the vision of beauty.” (CWSA 24: 591)

“... Love is an intense self-expression of the soul of Ananda ...” (CWSA 28: 6)

“Love is, in its essence, the joy of identity; it finds its ultimate expression in the bliss of union.” (CWM 12: 65)

10. One can find the Divine in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother through love and self-giving

“Q: Beloved Mother, how shall I find the source of that Love which will make me feel that the divine Presence is always and everywhere?

A: You must find the Divine first, whether in yourself by interiorisation and concentration, or in Sri Aurobindo and me through love and self-giving. Once you have found the Divine you will naturally see Him in all things and everywhere.” (CWM 16: 160)

11. Love is a passion — it seeks for eternity and intensity

“Love is a passion and it seeks for two things, eternity and intensity ….” (CWSA 24: 569)

12. Love is the transfiguration of desire

“Love is the transfiguration of desire, a desire of possessing others but also of self-giving; at first subject to hunger and the desire of possession it reveals its own true law by an equal or greater joy in self-giving.” (CWSA 13: 475)

“The desire for the Divine or of bhakti for the Divine is the one desire which can free one from all the others—at the core it is not a desire, but an aspiration, a soul need, the breath of existence of the inmost being and as such it cannot be counted among desires.” (CWSA 32: 476)

13. Love understands and cures — not forgive

“Love does not forgive, it understands and cures.” (CWM 16: 213)

14. The physical being is unable to hold the love for very long

“No, nothing withdraws; it is the physical being which is unable, by nature, to hold the joy and love for very long, unless it is completely governed by the psychic.” (CWM 17: 73)

15. Love comes to us in many ways

“Love comes to us in many ways; it may come as an awakening to the beauty of the Lover, by the sight of an ideal face and image of him, by his mysterious hints to us of himself behind the thousand faces of things in the world, by a slow or sudden need of the heart, by a vague thirst in the soul, by the sense of someone near us drawing us or pursuing us with love or of someone blissful and beautiful whom we must discover.” (CWSA 24: 604-605)

16. Knowledge through love is direct knowledge by identity

“Q: Sweet Mother, here Sri Aurobindo writes*: “And yet there is in the heart or behind it a profounder mystic light...”

[*Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 140]

What is this mystic light?

A: It is love.

Q: But after that, Sri Aurobindo continues: “... which, if not what we call intuition—for that, though not of the mind, yet descends through the mind—has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human intellect in its pride of knowledge.” Is there a relation between this mystic light and intuition?

A: It is not intuition. It is knowledge through love, light through love, understanding through love. Sri Aurobindo says that it is not intuition, for intuition belongs to the intellect—at least in its expression, the expression of intuition is intellectual. While this is a kind of direct knowledge almost by identity, which comes from love.” (CWM 8: 187)

17. Red rose is the flower of love

“The red rose is the flower of love and surrender, the white is the purity of psychic love.” (CWSA 30: 180)

“The crimson colour is the light of Love in the vital and physical.” (CWSA 30: 133)

“Crimson light indicates the manifestation of love in the material atmosphere.” (CWSA 32: 262)

II—What Is Love for the Divine

1. The true love for the Divine is a self-giving, free of demand, full of submission and surrender

“The true love for the Divine is a self-giving, free of demand, full of submission and surrender; it makes no claim, imposes no condition, strikes no bargain, indulges in no violences of jealousy or pride or anger—for these things are not in its composition.” (CWSA 29: 338) (CWSA 32: 461)

“Integral love for the Divine: pure, complete and irrevocable, it is a love that gives itself for ever.” (CWM 14: 131)

2. ‘For the Divine’ means to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness

“The phrase [‘for the Divine’], however, means that the object of the Yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the Divine’s sake alone ...” (CWSA 29: 21)

3. The true love for the Divine in its fundamental nature is psychic and spiritual

“But the true love for the Divine is in its fundamental nature not of this kind, but psychic and spiritual. The psychic element is the need of the inmost being for self-giving, love, adoration, union which can only be fully satisfied by the Divine. The spiritual element is the need of the being for contact, merging, union with its own highest and whole self and source of being and consciousness and bliss, the Divine. These two are two sides of the same thing. The mind, vital, physical can be the supports and recipients of this love, but they can be fully that only when they become remoulded into harmony with the psychic and spiritual elements of the being and no longer bring in the lower insistences of the ego.” (CWSA 29: 340–341)

4. Who has experienced love for the Divine can no longer love anything but the Divine

425 — The next greatest rapture to the love of God, is the love of God in men; there, too, one has the joy of multiplicity.

426 — For monogamy may be the best for the body, but the soul that loves God in men dwells here always as the boundless and ecstatic polygamist; yet all the time— that is the secret—it is in love with only one being.

Thoughts and Aphorisms

“Someone who has experienced love for the Divine can no longer love anything but the Divine, and it is the Divine he loves in all those for whom he feels affection; besides, this is the best way to love, because in this way one can be a powerful help for others to become conscious of the Divine who manifests in them.” (CWM 10: 333)

5. To love the Divine is to be loved by Him

“To love the Divine is to be loved by Him.” (CWM 16: 26)

“The only love that never fails is the Divine’s.

Love the Divine alone and the Divine will always be with you.” (CWM 14: 14)

6. The love for the Divine is the strongest force to get to the higher Consciousness

“The higher Consciousness is a state of pure love but it is also a state of pure openness to divine knowledge. There is no opposition there between these two kindred things; it is the mind that makes them separate.

The best way to get to it is to refuse all mental agitation when it comes, also all vital desires and turmoils, and to keep the mind and heart turned as constantly as possible towards the Divine.

The love for the Divine is the strongest force for doing this.” (CWM 16: 213—214)

7. The greatest test of love and devotion is when it burns as strongly in long absence as in the presence

“The vital seems to think the sadhana ought to cease if you do not see the Mother, but that would only mean that the love and devotion need the stimulus of physical contact; the greatest test of love and devotion is on the contrary when it burns as strongly in long absence as in the presence. If your sadhana went on as well on non pranam as on pranam days it would not prove that love and devotion are not there, but that they are so strong as to be self-existent in all circumstances.” (CWSA 32: 560—561)

8. When one loves the Divine truly and totally, then one also loves His creation and His creatures

“When one loves the Divine truly and totally, then one also loves His creation and His creatures; and naturally, among His creatures, there may be some that one feels closer to and loves more specially. But then the love that one feels is not a selfish love of the ordinary human kind; it is no longer a love that wants to hold and possess, but a love that gives itself without asking anything in return.

To love for the joy of loving is the best condition for a peaceful and happy life; it amounts, in other words, to loving the Divine in all things.” (CWM 17: 371)

“This is a miracle that men can love God, yet fail to love humanity. With whom are they in love then? On Thoughts and Aphorisms.

In this aphorism Sri Aurobindo refers to those who follow the ascetic path in solitary search of a solitary God, by trying to cut themselves off completely from the world and men.

But for Sri Aurobindo men form part of the Divine; and if you truly love the Divine, how can you not love men, since they are an aspect of Himself?” (CWM 10: 82)

“For God has not set me here merely to think, to philosophise, to weave metaphysical systems, to play with words and syllogisms, but to act, love and know. I must act divinely so that I may become divine in being and deed; I must learn to love God not only in Himself but in all beings, appearances, objects, enjoyments, events, whether men call them good or bad, real or mythical, fortunate or calamitous; and I must know Him with the same divine impartiality and completeness in order that I may come to be like Him, perfect, pure and unlimited that which all sons of Man must one day be.” (CWSA 12: 8)

9. Love of the Divine in all beings can only express itself in a general — dynamic universal goodwill

“‘Love of the Divine in all beings and the constant perception and acceptance of its workings in all things’ [Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 23, p. 851] —if this is one of the ways of realising the Divine and seeing Him in all, why do we here restrict our contacts with people in the outside world? Why can we not give our love to all?”

(Reply of Sri Aurobindo)

“That is all right in the ordinary Karma yoga which aims at union with the cosmic spirit and stops short at the overmind—but here a special work has to be done and a new realisation achieved for the earth and not for ourselves alone. It is necessary to stand apart from the rest of the world so as to separate ourselves from the ordinary consciousness in order to bring down a new one.

It is not that love for all is not part of the sadhana, but it has not to translate itself at once into a mixing with all—it can only express itself in a general and when need be dynamic universal goodwill, but for the rest it must find vent in this labour of bringing down the higher consciousness with all its effect for the earth. As for accepting the working of the Divine in all things that is necessary here too in the sense of seeing it even behind our struggles and difficulties, but not accepting the nature of man and the world as it is—our aim is to move towards a more divine working which will replace what now is by a greater and happier manifestation. That too is a labour of divine Love.” (CWM 13: 146—147)

10. Through the effort of loving the Divine one grows more and more like the Divine

“I have said that one grows into the likeness of what one loves. So if one loves the Divine, gradually, through this effort of love, one grows more and more like the Divine, and then one can be identified with the divine love and know what it is, otherwise one can’t.” (CWM 6: 102)

“There is only one true love—it is the Divine Love; all other loves are diminutions, limitations and deformations of that Love. Even the love of the bhakta for his God is a diminution and often is tainted by egoism. But as one tends quite naturally to become like what one loves, the bhakta, if he is sincere, begins to become like the Divine whom he adores, and thus his love becomes purer and purer. To adore the Divine in the one whom one loves has often been suggested as a solution, but unless one’s heart and thought are very pure, it can lead to deplorable abasements.” (CWM 16: 297)

“Moreover, it is a well-known fact that one grows into the likeness of what one loves. Therefore if you want to be like the Divine, love Him alone. Only one who has known the ecstasy of the exchange of love with the Divine can know how insipid and dull and feeble any other exchange is in comparison. And even if the most austere discipline is required to arrive at this exchange, nothing is too hard, too long or too severe in order to achieve it, for it surpasses all expression.” (CWM 12: 69)

“It is said that one grows into the likeness of what one loves; but with regard to God it is also true that one can remain always with Him only when one grows into His likeness.” (CWM 14: 130)

11. There is bound to be devotion if the sadhak is sincere

“If he [the sadhak] is sincere, there is bound to be devotion. Sincerity in Yoga means to respond to the Divine alone and if he has no devotion he cannot do it.” (CWSA 29: 53)

12. True love for the Divine is one of the safeguard against the downfall in Yoga

“I have never said that Yoga or that this Yoga is a safe and easy path. What I say is that anyone who has the will to go through can go through. ... But the danger is for those who allow themselves to entertain a double being, aiming high but also indulging their lower outlook and hankerings. What else can you expect when people do that?  ... But there is the fact also that nobody need keep himself in this danger. One-mindedness (ekanistha), surrender to the Divine, faith, true love for the Divine, complete sincerity in the will, spiritual humility (real, not formal)—there are so many things that can be a safeguard against any chance of eventual downfall.” (CWSA 31: 674—675)

III—True Love

1. True love is the love from the Divine, which in human beings, turns into love for the Divine

“Do you know what is true love?

There is only one true love, the love from the Divine, which, in human beings, turns into love for the Divine.

Shall we say that the nature of the Divine is Love.” (CWM 12: 304)

2. True love is the Divine Force that allows consciousnesses to unite with the Divine

“As for true love, it is the Divine Force that allows consciousnesses to unite themselves with the Divine.” (CWM 14: 124)

3. True love is very deep and calm in its intensity; it may not manifest itself in any exterior acts sensational or affectionate

“True love is something very deep and calm in its intensity; it may quite well not manifest itself in any exterior acts sensational or affectionate.” (CWM 14: 124)

“True love is something very deep and very calm in its intensity; it may very well not manifest itself through outer effusiveness.” (CWM 16: 173)

“… as I told you, it is a deep spiritual calm and peace that is the only stable foundation for a lasting Bhakti and Ananda.” (CWSA 31: 287)

4. All true love attempts towards a oneness

“All true love and all sacrifice are in their essence Nature’s contradiction of the primary egoism and its separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from which we have separated, a discovery of one’s self in others.

But it is only a divine love and unity that can possess in the light what the human forms of these things seek for in the darkness.” (CWSA 23: 107-108)

“… for true love seeks for union and self-giving and that is the love one must bring to the Divine. This vital (so-called) love brings only suffering and disappointment; it does not bring happiness; it never gets satisfied and, even if it is granted something that it asks for, it is never satisfied with it.” (CWSA 35: 577)

5. Selflessness, entire faith and confidence, absence of demand and desire, surrender to the Divine Will, love concentrated on the Divine are some of the main signs of true love

“Selflessness, self-giving, entire faith and confidence, absence of demand and desire, surrender to the Divine Will, love concentrated on the Divine—are some of the main signs [of true love and bhakti].” (CWSA 29: 356)

6. Love is steady and all-embracing and self-existent like the light of the sun

“Love cannot be cold—for there is no such thing as cold love, but the love of which the Mother speaks in that passage is something very pure, fixed and constant; it does not leap like fire and sink for want of fuel, but is steady and all-embracing and self-existent like the light of the sun.” (CWSA 32: 608)

7. True love is a self-forgetting

“True love is a self-forgetting.” (CWM 17: 140)

“My sweet Lord, my little Mother,

Give me the true love, the love that forgets itself.” (CWM 15: 215)

8. True love wants the highest good for the loved one

“True love is the love that wants, to the exclusion of all else, the highest good for the loved one. This is the love that I have and want to have for you.” (CWM 16: 117)

9. To know what true love is you first have to realise the Divine Consciousness

“You first have to realise the Divine Consciousness—only then will you be able to know what true love is.” (CWM 16: 119)

“True love and consecration lead much quicker to the Divine than an arduous Tapasya.” (CWM 14: 100)

“As for perfect love, it exists only in the Divine.” (CWM 16: 253)

“Whereas with one’s heart, one can set out to discover the Immanent Divine. And if one knows truly how to love, without desire or egoism, one finds Him very soon, for always He comes to meet you in order to help you.” (CWM 16: 252)

“Indeed, as soon as one becomes conscious of the Divine and is united with Him, one learns to love with the true love: the love that loves for the joy of loving and has no need to be loved in return; one also learns to draw Force from the inexhaustible source and one knows by experience that by using this Force in the service of the Divine one receives from Him all that one has spent and much more.” (CWM 16: 401)

10. It is only the psychic being that knows true love

“In terrestrial man, it is only the psychic being that knows true love.” (CWM 16: 253)

“True love is in the soul (all the rest is vital attraction or mental and physical attachment, nothing else) and the soul (the psychic being) knows instinctively what the other needs to receive and is always ready to give it to him.” (CWM 16: 297)

11. Nothing brings more happiness than a pure and disinterested love

“Indeed, nothing brings more happiness than a pure and disinterested love.” (CWM 16: 172)

“Indeed he is happy who loves the Divine because the Divine is always with him.” (CWM 14: 180)

12. The true and sacred love is utilised as a means for increasing and perfecting the union

“When the true and sacred love is there (love from the Divine and for the Divine), whatever happens is always utilised as a means for increasing and perfecting the union. This leaves no place for worry, regret and depression, but, on the contrary, fills the consciousness with the certitude of victory.” (CWM 14: 131)

13. Love is composed of two movements — the supreme power of attraction and the irresistible need for absolute self-giving

“At the beginning of this manifestation, in the purity of its origin, love is composed of two movements, two complementary poles of the urge towards complete oneness. On one hand there is the supreme power of attraction and on the other the irresistible need for absolute self-giving.” (CWM 12: 65–66)

“It may be said that at its origin love is the supreme power of attraction which awakens, in response, the irresistible need of an absolute self-giving; they are the two poles of the urge towards complete fusion.

No other movement could, better and more surely than this, throw a bridge across the abyss dug by the sense of separation that comes from the formation of the individual. It was necessary to bring back to itself what had been projected into space without destroying for this purpose the universe created thus.

That is why love sprang up, the irresistible power of union.” (CWM 14: 118)

14. Finally one loves purely and simply, without any other need or joy than that of loving

“At first one loves only when one is loved.

Next, one loves spontaneously, but one wants to be loved in return.

Then one loves even if one is not loved, but one still wants one’s love to be accepted.

And finally one loves purely and simply, without any other need or joy than that of loving.” (CWM 14: 122)

IV—What is not True Love

1. Attachment is not love

“Therefore attachment and desire must be utterly cast out; there is nothing in the world to which we must be attached, not wealth nor poverty, nor joy nor suffering, nor life nor death, nor greatness nor littleness, nor vice nor virtue, nor friend, nor wife, nor children, nor country, nor our work and mission, nor heaven nor earth, nor all that is within them or beyond them. And this does not mean that there is nothing at all that we shall love, nothing in which we shall take delight; for attachment is egoism in love and not love itself, desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure and satisfaction and not the seeking after the divine delight in things.” (CWSA 23: 329-330)

2. Sentimentality is a weak and superficial emotionalism

“Don’t you call ‘dry and hard’ an absence of sentimentality, that is, of a weak and superficial emotionalism?

True love … may very well not manifest itself through outer effusiveness.” (CWM 16: 173)

“To indulge in the emotions, love, grief, sorrow, despair, emotional joy etc. for their own sake with a sort of mental-vital over-emphasis on them is what is called sentimentalism.” (CWSA 29: 351)

“When the consciousness indulges in these things [joy and sorrow] and wallows in the excitement of emotional joy or suffering, that is called sentimentalism. There is another kind in which the mind enjoys its perceptions of emotion, love and suffering etc. and plays with them, but that is a less violent and more superficial sentimentalism.” (CWSA 29: 351–352)

3. No vital demand in true love

“If the love is absolute and complete and there has never been any vital demand connected with it, then suggestions of revolt cannot come.” (CWSA 29: 348)

“As for love, the love must be turned singly towards the Divine. What men call by that name is a vital interchange for mutual satisfaction of desire, vital impulse or physical pleasure. There must be nothing of this interchange between sadhaks; for to seek for it or indulge this kind of impulse only leads away from the sadhana.” (CWSA 31: 265)

“The love which human beings feel for one another is also usually an egoistic vital love and these other movements, claim, demand, jealousy, abhiman, anger etc., are its common accompaniments. There is no place for them in Yoga—nor in true love, psychic or divine. In Yoga all love should be turned towards the Divine and to human or other beings only as vessels of the Divine—abhiman and the rest should have no place in it.” (CWSA 31: 284)

“Q: What must I do to feel that You love me?

A: Care more about loving than about being loved.” (CWM 17: 144)

“Q: Though I know the Mother is giving me divine things from deep within, my lower nature wants her love and affection to be expressed outwardly. Help me to get rid of this vital demand for some outer expression by the Mother.

A: That is what you must get rid of—the demand of the vital in the relation with the Mother. It has been the cause of much disturbance and several frictions, for behind it is a claim of the ego. The psychic relation is the true relation, the psychic gives itself without any demand asking only for love and surrender and union with the Divine, and even in that the asking is not a vital demand but an aspiration.” (CWSA 32: 473)

4. Seeking the Divine through service of human beings and not the direct service and love of the Divine, then one is following a wrong principle

“If one feels human beings to be near and the Divine to be far and seeks the Divine through service of and love of human beings and not the direct service and love of the Divine, then one is following a wrong principle—for that is the principle of the mental, vital and moral, not the spiritual life.” (CWSA 35: 753)

“It is possible, again, to open the doors of life more largely and to spend one’s love of the Divine in acts of service to those around us and to the race; one can do the works of philanthropy, benevolence and beneficence, charity and succour to man and beast and every creature, transfigure them by a kind of spiritual passion, at least bring into their merely ethical appearance the greater power of a spiritual motive. This is indeed the solution most commonly favoured by the religious mind of today and we see it confidently advanced on all sides as the proper field of action of the God-seeker or of the man whose life is founded on divine love and knowledge. But the integral Yoga pushed towards a complete union of the Divine with the earth-life cannot stop short in this narrow province limit this union within the lesser dimensions of an ethical rule of philanthropy and beneficence.” (CWSA 23: 162)

5. In integral Yoga we cannot stop short in narrow province

“It is when we come to the works of love that a certain perplexity is likely to intervene. It is possible, as in a certain high exaggeration of the path of knowledge, to cut here also the knot of the problem, escape the difficulty of uniting the spirit of love with the crudities of the world-action by avoiding it; it is open to us, withdrawing from outward life and action altogether, to live alone with our adoration of the Divine in the heart’s silence. It is possible too to admit only those acts that are either in themselves an expression of love for the Divine, prayer, praise, symbolic acts of worship or subordinate activities that may be attached to these things and partake of their spirit, and to leave aside all else; the soul turns away to satisfy its inner longing in the absorbed or the God-centred life of the saint and devotee. … But the integral Yoga pushed towards a complete union of the Divine with the earth-life cannot stop short in this narrow province or limit this union within the lesser dimensions of an ethical rule of philanthropy and beneficence.” (CWSA 23: 161–162)

6. Fear of God keeps an awed distance and cannot embrace the Divine

“In certain religions, in most perhaps, the idea of the fear of God plays a very large part, sometimes the largest, and the Godfearing man is the typical worshipper of these religions. The sentiment of fear is indeed perfectly consistent with devotion of a certain kind and up to a certain point; at its highest it rises into a worship of the divine Power, the divine Justice, divine Law, divine Righteousness, and ethical obedience, an awed reverence for the almighty Creator and Judge. Its motive is therefore ethico-religious and it belongs not so strictly to the devotee, but to the man of works moved by a devotion to the divine ordainer and judge of his works. It regards God as the King and does not approach too near the glory of his throne unless justified by righteousness or led there by a mediator who will turn away the divine wrath for sin. Even when it draws nearest, it keeps an awed distance between itself and the high object of its worship. It cannot embrace the Divine with all the fearless confidence of the child in his mother or of the lover in his beloved or with that intimate sense of oneness which perfect love brings with it.” (CWSA 24: 561–562)

7. Fear of the gods cannot bring real devotion

“The origin of this divine fear was crude enough in some of the primitive popular religions. ... Fear of the gods arose from man’s ignorance of God and his ignorance of the laws that govern the world. It attributed to the higher powers caprice and human passion; it made them in the image of the great ones of the earth, capable of whim, tyranny, personal enmity, jealous of any greatness in man which might raise him above the littleness of terrestrial nature and bring him too near to the divine nature. With such notions no real devotion could arise, except that doubtful kind which the weaker may feel for the stronger whose protection he can buy by worship and gifts and propitiation and obedience to such laws as he may have laid upon those beneath him and may enforce by rewards and punishments, or else the submissive and prostrate reverence and adoration which one may feel for a greatness, glory, wisdom, sovereign power which is above the world and is the source or at any rate the regulator of all its laws and happenings.” (CWSA 24: 562)

8. One cannot love through compulsion

“One cannot love through compulsion, you cannot be compelled to love, it is no longer love. Therefore, as soon as compulsion intervenes, it becomes a falsehood.” (CWM 9: 52)

9. Wrong attitude to ask for Divine Love

“Q: I pray: ‘Dear Mother, either give me psychic love or give me death. Let no third thing come to me. This is my final resolution.’

A: This is altogether the wrong attitude. It is once more the vital coming in—it is not a psychic attitude. If in asking for the psychic love, you take an attitude that is vital not psychic, how do you expect the psychic to come?" (CWSA 32: 469)

10. It is not through human love that one can learn to love the Divine

“It is not through human love that one can learn to love the Divine, for the love is of quite a different nature.” (CWM 14: 130)

11. The vital and mental bhakti

“The vital bhakti is egoistic, usually full of claims and demands on the Divine and revolting when they are not satisfied. The mental is simply a worship in the thought and idea without love in the heart.” (CWSA 29: 358)

“Vital bhakti is usually full of desires and demands,—it expects a return for what it gives; it loves the Divine more for its own sake than for the sake of the Divine. If it does not get what it wants, it is capable of revolting or turning elsewhere. It is often pursued by jealousy, misunderstanding, unfaithfulness, anger etc.,—the usual imperfections of human love, and can turn these against its object of bhakti. On the other hand, if there is vital bhakti governed by the psychic, these defects disappear and the vital gives an ardour and enthusiasm to the love and bhakti which gives it a greater push for effectuation in action and life. The vital should always be the instrument of the soul for self-expression in life and not act on its own account (ego, desire) or on its own separate impulse.” (CWSA 29: 358)

“The vital concerned only with emotion finds the mental knowledge dry and without rasa, the mind finds the bhakti to be a blind emotion fully interesting only when its character has been analysed and understood. There is no such opposition when the psychic and the higher plane knowledge act together predominantly— the psychic welcomes knowledge that supports its emotion, the higher thought consciousness rejoices in the bhakti.” (CWSA 29: 358–359)

“A devotion that keeps concentrated and silent in the depths of the heart but manifests in acts of service and obedience, is more powerful, more true, more divine, than any shouting and weeping devotion.” (CWM 14: 98)

“The Divine always brings with it perfect calm and peace. A certain class of Bhaktas, it is true, present generally a very different picture; they jump about and cry and laugh and sing, in a fit of devotion, as they say. But in reality such people do not live in the Divine. They live largely in the vital world.

You say that even Ramakrishna had periods of emotional excitement and would go about with hands uplifted, singing and dancing? The truth of the matter is this. The movement in the inner being may be perfect; but it puts you in a certain condition of receptivity to forces that fill you with intense emotional excitement, if your external being is weak or untransformed. Where the external being offers resistance to the inner being or cannot hold the entirety of the Ananda, there is this confusion and anarchy in expression.

You must have a strong body and strong nerves. You must have a strong basis of equanimity in your external being. If you have this basis, you can contain a world of emotion and yet not have to scream it out. This does not mean that you cannot express your emotion, but you can express it in a beautiful harmonious way. To weep or scream or dance about is always a proof of weakness, either of the vital or the mental or the physical nature; for on all these levels the activity is for self satisfaction. One who dances and jumps and screams has the feeling that he is somehow very unusual in his excitement; and his vital nature takes great pleasure in that.

If you have to bear the pressure of the Divine Descent, you must be very strong and powerful, otherwise you would be shaken to pieces. Some persons ask, ‘Why has not the Divine come yet?’ Because you are not ready. If a little drop makes you sing and dance and scream, what would happen if the whole thing came down?” (CWM 3: 10–11)

V—Pure and Perfect Love has to Get Rid of Their Earthy Elements

“Thus the motives of devotion have first to direct themselves engrossingly and predominantly towards the Divine, then to transform themselves so that they are rid of their more earthy elements and finally to take their stand in pure and perfect love. All those that cannot coexist with the perfect union of love, must eventually fall away, while only those that can form themselves into expressions of divine love and into means of enjoying divine love, can remain.” (CWSA 24: 559)

“Q: We all want Mother’s love, but I wonder how many of us truly love the Mother. Where indeed do we see one-pointed, ever-sacrificing, never-failing love? Who has love only for the Divine?

A: It does not mean that there is no love, but that the love is mixed up and covered with egoism, demand and vital movements. At least that is the case with many. There are some of course who have no love at all, or ‘love’—if it can be called so—only for what they get, one or two who love truly—but in a great many there is a psychic spark hidden in much smoke. The smoke has to be got rid of so that the spark may have a chance of growing into a blaze.” (CWSA 32: 480)

1. The ordinary human love calls for a return, there is self-interest and demand

“When the love goes towards the Divine, there is still this ordinary human element in it. There is the call for a return and if the return does not seem to come, the love may sink; there is the self-interest, the demand for the Divine as a giver of all that the human being wants and, if the demands are not acceded to, abhimana against the Divine, loss of faith, loss of fervour. Etc. etc. But the true love for the Divine is in its fundamental nature not of this kind, but psychic and spiritual.” (CWSA 29: 340–341)

2. The path of love may be long, chequered with misunderstanding, jealousy, strife

“Where first there is love and attraction, the relations between the Divine and the soul may still for long be chequered with misunderstanding and offence, jealousy and wrath, strife and the quarrels of love, hope and despair and the pain of absence and separation. We throw up all the passions of the heart against him, till they are purified into a sole ecstasy of bliss and oneness.” (CWSA 24: 605)

3. Lust is a mistranslation of love

“All undesirable things are a mistranslation in the Ignorance of something that on a higher plane is or might be desirable. Inertia, tamas, is the mistranslation of the divine sama, rest, quietude, peace; pain is a mistranslation of Ananda, lust of love etc. It is only when the lower perversions are got rid of that the higher things in their truth can reign.” (CWSA 28: 49)

4. The heart’s love allies itself with a vital desire in the body and is called lust

“Love is an emotion of the heart and may be a pure feeling … but the heart’s love allies itself readily with a vital desire in the body. This physical element may be purified of that subjection to physical desire which is called lust, it may become love using the body for a physical as well as a mental and spiritual nearness; but love may, too, separate itself from all, even the most innocent physical element, or from all but a shadow of it, and be a pure movement to union of soul with soul, psyche with psyche.” (CWSA 24: 650)

5. In human the sublime force of love is linked with the movement of procreation

“It is indeed love … as the urge behind all movement and all grouping, which becomes quite perceptible in the plant kingdom In trees and plants, it is the need to grow in order to obtain more light, more air, more space; in flowers, it is the offering of their beauty and fragrance in a loving efflorescence. Then, in animals, it is love that lies behind hunger and thirst, the need for appropriation, expansion, procreation, in short, behind every desire, whether conscious or not. And among the higher species, it is in the self-sacrificing devotion of the female to her young. This brings us quite naturally to the human race in which, with the triumphant advent of mental activity, this association reaches its climax, for it has become conscious and deliberate. Indeed, as soon as terrestrial development made it possible, Nature took up this sublime force of love and put it at the service of her creative work by linking and mixing it with her movement of procreation. This association has even become so close, so intimate, that very few human beings are illumined enough in their consciousness to be able to dissociate these movements from each other and experience them separately. In this way, love has suffered every degradation; it has been debased to the level of the beast.” (CWM 12: 66–67)

6. The Love that comes from above gets changed into a kind of passion

“Q: Can’t the love and peace that come from above get distorted when they enter the mind and vital?

A: Indeed they very often are; the love gets changed into a kind of passion and the peace into inertia.” (CWM 17: 86)

7. With the impulses of physical and vital Nature, Love becomes corrupted and darkened

“It is indeed love, in a corrupted and darkened form, that is associated with all the impulses of physical and vital Nature ...” (CWM 12: 66)

8. The adverse forces have perverted love

“It seems that the only method which can overcome all resistances is the method of Love. But then the adverse forces have perverted love in such a way that many very sincere people, sincere seekers, have steeled themselves, so to say, against this method, because of its distortion. That is the difficulty. That is why it is taking time.” (CWM 10: 211)

9. If you are impure and egoistic, love in you will become impure and egoistic, narrow, sectarian, limited, ambitious and possessive, violent, jealous, vulgar, brutal and cruel

“First learn to give yourself sincerely to the Divine and then the joy of love will come afterwards. By giving yourself sincerely all your difficulties will disappear. You say of your God: ‘I have loved Him so much and yet He did not remain with me!’ But what kind of love have you given Him? In its essence, love is one, just as consciousness is one; but in the manifestation, it is coloured and differentiated by each individual nature. If you are impure and egoistic, love in you will become impure and egoistic, narrow, sectarian, limited, ambitious and possessive, violent, jealous, vulgar, brutal and cruel. Is this the kind of love that can be offered to God? If you want your love to be worthy of the one you love, if you want to enjoy love in its eternal perfection, become perfect, break out of the limitations of your ego, partake of eternity. And then you will always be close to the object of your love, for you will grow into his likeness.” (CWM 14: 130)

10. If the love is too vital, then either ecstatic expectation or viraha, abhimana, despair, will make the path a whirling round one’s own ego

“Love, bhakti, surrender, the psychic opening are the only short cut to the Divine—or can be; for if the love and bhakti are too vital, then there is likely to be a seesaw between ecstatic expectation and viraha, abhimana, despair, which will make it not a short cut but a long one, a zigzag, not a straight flight, a whirling round one’s own ego instead of a running towards the Divine.” (CWSA 29: 212) (CWSA 35: 743)

11. Too much vital eagerness often blocks the way

“Our experience is that too much vital eagerness and insistence often blocks the way, it makes a sort of obstructing mass or a whirl of restlessness and disturbance which leaves no quiet space for the Divine to get in or for the thing wished for to come. Often it does come, but when the impatience has been definitely renounced and one waits, quietly open, for whatever may be (or for the time not be) given. But so often when you are preparing for a greater progress in the true devotion the habit of this vital element stands up and takes hold and interrupts the progress made.” (CWSA 29: 474)

12. Not to want to possess, to dominate; and not to impose one’s will, one’s whims

“Not to want to possess, to dominate; and not to want to impose one’s will, one’s whims, one’s desires; not to want to take, to receive, but to give; not to insist on the other’s response, but be content with one’s own love; not to seek one’s personal interest and joy and the fulfilment of one’s personal desire, but to be satisfied with the giving of one’s love and affection; and not to ask for any response. Simply to be happy to love, nothing more.” (CWM 8: 301–302)

“Q: ‘If behind your devotion and surrender you make a cover for your desires, egoistic demands ...’ [CWSA 32: p. 3]. Does this mean ‘you use devotion and surrender as a means of fulfilling your desires and demands’?

A: Yes, practically it means that. I put it in that way so as to avoid suggesting that the devotion is altogether insincere and meant only as a cover.” (CWSA 35: 109)

13. To stop being selfish

“If you do that, you have taken a great stride forward and can, through this attitude, gradually advance farther in the feeling itself, and realise one day that love is not something personal, that love is a universal divine feeling which manifests through you more or less finely, but which in its essence is something divine.

The first step is to stop being selfish. For everyone it is the same thing, not only for those who want to do yoga but also in ordinary life: if one wants to know how to love, one must not love oneself first and above all selfishly; one must give oneself to the object of love without exacting anything in return. This discipline is elementary in order to surmount oneself and lead a life which is not altogether gross.” (CWM 8: 302)

VI—To Refine and Purify the Grossness of love

1. Affection, tenderness, goodwill, compassion, benevolence, all beauty and gentleness and fineness and light and strength and courage, that can help to refine and purify the grossness

“In the first long stage of its [psychic] growth and immature existence it has leaned on earthly love, affection, tenderness, goodwill, compassion, benevolence, on all beauty and gentleness and fineness and light and strength and courage, on all that can help to refine and purify the grossness and commonness of human nature; but it knows how mixed are these human movements at their best and at their worst how fallen and stamped with the mark of ego and self-deceptive sentimental falsehood and the lower self profiting by the imitation of a soul-movement. ” (CWSA 23: 155–156)

2. We shall replace love in our relations with others by an egoless kindness and goodwill that will not expect any reward or gratitude or even any recognition

3. Never allow yourself to be carried away by any resentment

“Since we have decided to reserve love in all its splendour for our personal relationship with the Divine, we shall replace it in our relations with others by a total, unvarying, constant and egoless kindness and goodwill that will not expect any reward or gratitude or even any recognition. However others may treat you, you will never allow yourself to be carried away by any resentment; and in your unmixed love for the Divine, you will leave him sole judge as to how he is to protect you and defend you against the misunderstanding and bad will of others.

You will await your joys and pleasures from the Divine alone. In him alone will you seek and find help and support. He will comfort you in all your sorrows, guide you on the path, lift you up if you stumble, and if there are moments of failure and exhaustion, he will take you up in his strong arms of love and enfold you in his soothing sweetness.” (CWM 12: 70)

4. Only the love that is based on the Divine Presence can remain unmixed and present no obstacle to the sadhana

“Only the love that is based on the Divine Presence can remain unmixed and present no obstacle to the sadhana.” (CWM 17: 22)

5. In the psychic fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine perversions are burned away

“A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine perversions are burned away and the others discard their insufficiencies, till a spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the divine love which so emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be.” (CWSA 23: 165–166)

VII—How to Love the Divine

1. To love the Divine for his own sake

“Your argument that because we know the union with the Divine will bring Ananda, therefore it must be for the Ananda that we seek the union, is not true and has no force. One who loves a queen may know that if she returns his love it will bring him power, position, riches and yet it need not be for the power, position, riches that he seeks her love. He may love her for herself and could love her equally if she were not a queen; he might have no hope of any return whatever and yet love her, adore her, live for her, die for her simply because she is she. That has happened and men have loved women without any hope of enjoyment or result, loved steadily, passionately after age has come and beauty has gone. Patriots do not love their country only when she is rich, powerful, great and has much to give them; their love for country has been most ardent, passionate, absolute when the country was poor, degraded, miserable, having nothing to give but loss, wounds, torture, imprisonment, death as the wages of her service; yet even knowing that they would never see her free, men have lived, served and died for her—for her own sake, not for what she could give. Men have loved Truth for her own sake and for what they could seek or find of her, accepted poverty, persecution, death itself; they have been content even to seek for her always, not finding, and yet never given up the search.

That means what? That men, country, Truth and other things besides can be loved for their own sake and not for anything else, not for any circumstance or attendant quality or resulting enjoyment, but for something absolute that is either in them or behind their appearance and circumstance. The Divine is more than a man or woman, a stretch of land or a creed, opinion, discovery or principle. He is the Person beyond all persons, the Home and Country of all souls, the Truth of which truths are only imperfect figures. And can He then not be loved and sought for his own sake, as and more than these have been by men even in their lesser selves and nature?" (CWSA 29: 11–12)

2. All love should be turned towards the Divine

“As for love, the love must be turned singly towards the Divine.” (CWSA 31: 265)

“To give oneself to an outsider is to go out from the atmosphere of sadhana and give oneself to the outer world forces.

One can have a psychic feeling of love for someone, a universal love for all creatures, but one has to give oneself only to the Divine.” (CWSA 31: 320)

3. At the beginning your love for the Divine is a human love — if you make the necessary effort this human love can be transformed into Divine love

“Q: Sweet Mother, Sri Aurobindo has said that one can pass from human love to divine Love.

A: He was speaking of human love manifesting as Bhakti, as a force of devotion for the Divine, and he says that at the beginning your love for the Divine is a very human love with all the characteristics of human love. He describes this very well, besides. Yet if you persist and make the necessary effort, it is not impossible for this human love to be transformed into divine love through identification with what you love. He has not said that the love between two persons can change into divine love. It is not that at all! He has always said the opposite. He spoke about someone who had asked him about devotion, you know, about the sadhak’s love for the Divine. At the beginning your love is altogether human—and he speaks of it even as commercial barter. If you make progress, your love will change into divine love, into true devotion.” (CWM 6: 174–175)

4. As the consciousness deepens, heightens and changes that the human love can transform into the divine love

“The soul’s turning through love to the Divine must be through a love that is essentially divine, but as the instrument of expression at first is a human nature, it takes the forms of human love and bhakti. It is only as the consciousness deepens, heightens and changes that that greater eternal love can grow in it and openly transform the human into the divine.” (CWSA 29: 341)

5. Worship, adoration, love for the Divine

“The nature of bhakti is adoration, worship, self-offering to what is greater than oneself …” (CWSA 29: 356)

“Q: How can I have pure bhakti for the Mother?

A: Pure worship, adoration, love for the Divine without claim or demand is what is called suddha bhakti.

Q: From which part does it manifest?

A: From the psychic.” (CWSA 32: 476)

“True worship: total and constant without demand or exigence.” (CWM 14: 98)

“Worship: the form or outer expression of your devotion.” (CWM 14: 98)

6. It is the spirit in the act of worship that is the essential factor

“It is true that the special act or form of action has its importance, even a great importance, but it is the spirit in the act that is the essential factor; the spirit of which it is the symbol or materialised expression gives it its whole value and justifying significance. Or it may be said that a complete act of divine love and worship has in it three parts that are the expressions of a single whole,—a practical worship of the Divine in the act, a symbol of worship in the form of the act expressing some vision and seeking or some relation with the Divine, an inner adoration and longing for oneness or feeling of oneness in the heart and soul and spirit. It is so that life can be changed into worship,—by putting behind it the spirit of a transcendent and universal love, the seeking of oneness, the sense of oneness; by making each act a symbol, an expression of Godward emotion or a relation with the Divine; by turning all we do into an act of worship, an act of the soul’s communion, the mind’s understanding, the life’s obedience, the heart’s surrender.” (CWSA 23: 163)

7. Without a spiritual aspiration worship is meaningless and vain

8. The aspiration without the act is a disembodied and incompletely effective power

“In any cult the symbol, the significant rite or expressive figure is not only a moving and enriching aesthetic element, but a physical means by which the human being begins to make outwardly definite the emotion and aspiration of his heart, to confirm it and to dynamise it. For if without a spiritual aspiration worship is meaningless and vain, yet the aspiration also without the act and the form is a disembodied and, for life, an incompletely effective power. It is unhappily the fate of all forms in human life to become crystallised, purely formal and therefore effete, and although form and cult preserve always their power for the man who can still enter into their meaning, the majority come to use the ceremony as a mechanical rite and the symbol as a lifeless sign, and because that kills the soul of religion, cult and form have in the end to be changed or thrown aside altogether. There are those even to whom all cult and form are for this reason suspect and offensive; but few can dispense with the support of outward symbols and, even, a certain divine element in human nature demands them always for the completeness of its spiritual satisfaction. Always the symbol is legitimate in so far as it is true, sincere, beautiful and delightful, and even one may say that a spiritual consciousness without any aesthetic or emotional content is not entirely or at any rate not integrally spiritual. In the spiritual life the basis of the act is a spiritual consciousness perennial and renovating, moved to express itself always in new forms or able to renew the truth of a form always by the flow of the spirit, and to so express itself and make every action a living symbol of some truth of the soul is the very nature of its creative vision and impulse. It is so that the spiritual seeker must deal with life and transmute its form and glorify it in its essence.” (CWSA 23: 163–164)

9. Aspire to feel the presence of the Divine Mother in all your parts

“In return [of love for the Divine,] the Divine Mother also gives herself, but freely—and this represents itself in an inner giving—her presence in your mind, your vital, your physical consciousness, her power re-creating you in the divine nature, taking up all the movements of your being and directing them towards perfection and fulfilment, her love enveloping you and carrying you in its arms Godwards. It is this that you must aspire to feel and possess in all your parts down to the very material, and here there is no limitation either of time or of completeness. If one truly aspires and gets it, there ought to be no room for any other claim or for any disappointed desire. And if one truly aspires, one does unfailingly get it, more and more as the purification proceeds and the nature undergoes its needed change.” (CWSA 29: 338) (CWSA 32: 461)

“My love is always with you; if then you do not feel it, it is because you are not capable of receiving it. It is your receptivity that is lacking and should be increased; for this you must open yourself, and one opens oneself only if one gives oneself. Surely you are trying more or less consciously to draw the forces and the divine love towards you. The method is bad. Give yourself without calculating and without expecting anything in return, and then you will become capable of receiving.” (CWM 14: 148)

10. To turn life into an act of adoration to the Supreme offer all our thoughts, all our feelings and sensations, all our outward activities

“It is possible so to turn life into an act of adoration to the Supreme by the spirit in one’s works; for, says the Gita, “He who gives to me with a heart of adoration a leaf, a flower, a fruit or a cup of water, I take and enjoy that offering of his devotion”; and it is not only any dedicated external gift that can be so offered with love and devotion, but all our thoughts, all our feelings and sensations, all our outward activities and their forms and objects can be such gifts to the Eternal.” (CWSA 23: 162–163)

“Self-giving, which takes its full value when it is directed towards the Divine, is an active movement which includes love in its purest and highest form.” (CWM 10: 276)

11. Pray to the Divine Mother to take control of your actions and your nature

“If you cannot meditate, pray. Offer all you do to the Mother and pray to her to take control of your actions and your nature. Love and worship. What is needed is to get a full opening in which you will become conscious of the Mother. These things will bring the opening. Only, even if it takes time, you must not get depression, despair or revolt—for these things get into the way of the opening.” (CWSA 32: 159)

12. To feel that only the Divine force works, since it is by giving himself that one progresses

“As we read in one of our recent classes, for one who follows the path of action, it is much more difficult to feel that the human personality does not exist and that only the divine Force works. For one who follows the path of knowledge it is relatively very easy, it is something one discovers almost immediately. For one who follows the path of love it is elementary, since it is by giving himself that he progresses. But for one who follows the path of action it is much more difficult, and consequently for him the first step is to … create in himself this complete detachment from the fruit of action, to act because this is what must be done, … and not to be anxious about the consequences, to leave the consequences to a Will higher than his own.” (CWM 8: 323-324)

13. Surrender and love go together

“Surrender and love-bhakti are not contrary things—they go together. It is true that at first surrender can be made through knowledge by the mind, but it implies a mental bhakti and, as soon as the surrender reaches the heart, the bhakti manifests as a feeling and with the feeling of bhakti love comes.” (CWSA 29: 78)

“The indispensable surrender of all our will and works and activities to the Supreme is indeed only perfect and perfectly effective when it is a surrender of love. All life turned into this cult, all actions done in the love of the Divine and in the love of the world and its creatures seen and felt as the Divine manifested in many disguises become by that very fact part of an integral Yoga.” (CWSA 23: 165)

14. Surrender can come through love and love can come through surrender

“Self-surrender at first comes through love and bhakti, more than through Atmajnana.” (CWSA 29: 78)

“Also experience shows that not only can surrender come by love, but love also can come by surrender or grow with it from an imperfect to a perfect love.” (CWSA 28: 385)

“Complete surrender can best come by a complete love and bhakti. Bhakti on the other hand can begin without surrender, but it naturally leads, as it forms itself, to surrender.” (CWSA 30: 57)

“The more love and bhakti and surrender grow in the heart, the more rapid and perfect becomes the evolution of the sadhana.” (CWSA 32: 205)

“Aspiration, prayer, bhakti, love, surrender are the main supports of this part of the Sadhana— ...” (CWSA 32: 205)

15. All action must be made a part of the God-life and not our acts only of love

“All action must be made in it part of the God-life, our acts of knowledge, our acts of power and production and creation, our acts of joy and beauty and the soul’s pleasure, our acts of will and endeavour and struggle and not our acts only of love and beneficent service. Its way to do these things will be not outward and mental, but inward and spiritual, and to that end it will bring into all activities, whatever they are, the spirit of divine love, the spirit of adoration and worship, the spirit of happiness in the Divine and in the beauty of the Divine so as to make all life a sacrifice of the works of the soul’s love to the Divine, its cult of the Master of its existence.” (CWSA 23: 162)

16. To do all work as the Mother’s work

“That is indeed the rule that all ought to follow, to do their work here as the Mother’s work, not their own; the worker must not insist on the work being done according to his own ideas; for that is to treat it as his own work not the Mother’s. If there are inconveniences, troubles, things done not as he would like them to be, still he should go on doing his work as best he can under the circumstances. That is a rule of the sadhana, to remain unconcerned by outward circumstances and quietly do what one has to do, what one can do, leaving the rest to the Mother. It is not possible to have everything perfect at present, even supposing that what one thinks to be right is the best. There is much in the Asram and the work that is not as perfect as the Mother would like it to be, but she knows that the perfection she would like is not yet possible because of circumstances and the imperfection of her instruments; she arranges all for the best according to what is now possible. The worker should do his work in this spirit according to the Mother’s arrangements and he should use his work as a means for growing spiritually in devotion, obedience, self-offering to the Mother, not insisting on himself, his ideas, his feelings and preferences. To be able to do that makes the consciousness ready for inner experience and progress in sadhana.

I have tried to explain what the Mother wants and why she wants it. She wants you to do her work quietly, taking all inconveniences, defects or difficulties quietly, and doing your best; what X does or arranges should not disturb you—if he makes mistakes he is responsible for it to the Mother and it is for the Mother to see what is to be done. That is what she wants from you—if you can do it, then things will go more smoothly and she will be able more easily to lead things in the direction she wants. It is also, as I have tried to explain to you, the best thing for your own sadhana.” (CWSA 32: 414–415)

“Q: If one works with an attitude of service and love, but does not meditate, will it not lead to stagnation from an inner standpoint? Many say, “We are doing Mother’s work and that is sufficient.”

A: If they do it in the right spirit, then it may be sufficient for them, as it will bring the rest—because of the spirit in which they do it. It is a matter of idiosyncrasy—there are some who cannot get anything by meditation, so that work or bhakti is their only resource.” (CWSA 32: 250)

“I have always said that work done as sadhana—done, that is to say, as an outflow of energy from the Divine offered to the Divine or work done for the sake of the Divine or work done in a spirit of devotion—is a powerful means of sadhana and that such work is especially necessary in this Yoga. Work, bhakti and meditation are three supports of Yoga.... By work and bhakti one can develop a consciousness in which eventually a natural meditation and realisation become possible.” (CWSA 29: 209)

17. The love for the Divine is not only psychic love but the love of the vital mind and physical

“I should perhaps add one or two things to avoid misapprehensions. First, the love for the Divine of which I speak is not a psychic love only; it is the love of all the being, the vital and vital-physical included,—all are capable of the same self-giving. It is a mistake to believe that if the vital loves, it must be a love that demands and imposes the satisfaction of its desire; it is a mistake to think that it must be either that or else the vital, in order to escape from its “attachment”, must draw away altogether from the object of its love. The vital can be as absolute in its unquestioning self-giving as any other part of the nature; nothing can be more generous than its movement when it forgets self for the Beloved. The vital and physical should both give themselves in the true way—the way of true love, not of ego-desire.” (CWSA 29: 339)

“Love for the Divine must be there in all the being—not only in the spirit and the psychic heart, but in the vital and the physical consciousness also.” (CWSA 29: 341)

“If the mind and the vital can feel and accept the soul’s sheer love for the Divine for his own sake, then the sadhana gets its full power and many difficulties disappear ...” (CWSA 29: 13)

“If the mind and the heart have a settled devotion and are full of the Mother’s presence or in constant contact with her Light and Force, then the difficulties of the vital and physical consciousness in you can be met and conquered. It is that you must get first. To try to deal with the difficulties of the vital without this contact or presence, is premature and cannot succeed.” (CWSA 32: 383)

Q: Is there no place for mental and vital devotion in this Yoga?

A: Who says there is not? So long as it is real devotion, all bhakti has a place.” (CWSA 32: 477)

“Aspiration and devotion are the natural and easy means for getting the contact. The other way by effort is laborious, slow and not sure. The mind must open, but it will open best by the power of devotion and aspiration.” (CWSA 29: 361)

18. Turning the emotions towards the Divine

“It is no part of this Yoga to dry up the heart; but the emotions must be turned towards the Divine. ... The heart in this Yoga should in fact be the main centre of concentration until the consciousness rises above.” (CWSA 29: 350)

“Emotion is a good element in Yoga; but emotional desire becomes easily a cause of perturbation and an obstacle.

Turn your emotions towards the Divine, aspire for their purification; they will then become a help on the way and no longer a cause of suffering.

Not to kill emotion, but to turn it towards the Divine is the right way of the Yoga.

But it must become pure, founded upon spiritual peace and joy, capable of being transmuted into Ananda. ...

Awake by your aspiration the psychic fire in the heart that burns steadily towards the Divine—that is the one way to liberate and fulfil the emotional nature.” (CWSA 29: 350)

“The very basis of this Yoga is bhakti and if one kills one’s emotional being there can be no bhakti. So there can be no possibility of emotion being excluded from the Yoga.” (CWSA 29: 350–351)

“Emotion itself is not a bad thing; it is a necessary part of the nature, and psychic emotion is one of the most powerful helps to the sadhana. Psychic emotion, bringing tears of love for the Divine or tears of ananda, ought not to be suppressed: it is only a vital mixture that brings disturbance in the sadhana.” (CWSA 29: 351)

“If one does not encourage the devotion of the emotional being merely because the lower vital is not yet under control and acts differently, then how is the devotion to grow and how is the lower vital to change? Until the final clarification and harmonizing of the nature there are always contradictions in the being, but that is not a reason for in any way suppressing the play of the better movements—on the contrary it is these that should be cultivated and made to increase.” (CWSA 29: 357)

“It [emotion] has its place, only it must not be always thrown outward but pressed inward so as to open fully the psychic doors.” (CWSA 29: 357)

“The emotional [devotion] is more outward than the psychic [devotion]— it tends towards outward expression. The psychic is inward and gives the direction to the whole inner and outer life. The emotional can be intense, but is neither so sure in its basis nor powerful enough to change the whole direction of the life.” (CWSA 29: 357–358)

19. The influence of the love for the Divine is to turn that part towards the Divine

“The influence of the love for the Divine when it takes hold of any part is to turn it towards the Divine—as you describe it ‘concentration on the Mother’ —and in the end all is gathered and harmonised around this central turn of the being. The difficulty is with the mechanical parts of the being in which the old thoughts go on recurring by habit. If the concentration continues to grow, this becomes a thing of little importance at the circumference of the mind and in the end drops away to be replaced by things that belong to the new consciousness.” (CWSA 29: 341)

20. Pangs of separation belong to the vital

“Pangs of separation belong to the vital, not to the psychic; the psychic having no pangs need not express them. The psychic is always turned towards the Divine in faith, joy and confidence —whatever aspiration it has is full of trust and hope.” (CWSA 29: 359–360)

“It is a mistake to think that a constant absence of vyakulata is a sign that the aspiration or will for the Divine is not true. It is only in certain exclusive forms of Bhakti Yoga that a constant vyakulata or weeping or hahakara (the latter is more often vital than psychic) is the rule. Here though the psychic yearning may come sometimes or often in intense waves, what comes as the basis is a quietude of the being and in that quietude a more and more steady perception of the truth and seeking for the Divine and need of the Divine so that all is turned towards that more and more. It is into this that the experience and growing realisation come. Because the opening is growing in you, you are getting this abhasa of the presence (beyond form) of the Mother. It is as the inner realisation grows that the presence in the physical form takes its full value.” (CWSA 29: 359)

“Viraha is a transitional experience on the plane of the vital seeking for the Spirit—there is no reason why it should not be possible at a quite early stage. It is the realisations without any uneasiness, realisations in pure Ananda that belong to the more developed sadhana.” (CWSA 29: 359)

“The pure feeling of viraha is psychic—but if rajasic or Tamasic movements come in (such as depression, complaint, revolt etc.) then it becomes tamasic or rajasic.” (CWSA 29: 359)

21. A perfect equality is the effective condition when Love is perfected, widened and deepened

“By equality of the heart we get away from the troubled desire soul on the surface, open the gates of this profounder being, bring out its responses and impose their true divine values on all that solicits our emotional being. A free, happy, equal and all-embracing heart of spiritual feeling is the outcome of this perfection.

… Love will be not destroyed, but perfected, enlarged to its widest capacity, deepened to its spiritual rapture, the love of God, the love of man, the love of all things as ourselves and as beings and powers of the Divine; a large, universal love, not at all incapable of various relation, will replace the clamant, egoistic, self-regarding love of little joys and griefs and insistent demands afflicted with all the chequered pattern of angers and jealousies and satisfactions, rushings to unity and movements of fatigue, divorce and separation on which we now place so high a value. Grief will cease to exist, but a universal, an equal love and sympathy will take its place, not a suffering sympathy, but a power which, itself delivered, is strong to sustain, to help, to liberate. To the free spirit wrath and hatred are impossible, but not the strong Rudra energy of the Divine which can battle without hatred and destroy without wrath because all the time aware of the things it destroys as parts of itself, its own manifestations and unaltered therefore in its sympathy and understanding of those in whom are embodied these manifestations. All our emotional nature will undergo this high liberating transformation; but in order that it may do so, a perfect equality is the effective condition.” (CWSA 24: 704–705)

“In the deep peace of equanimity the love will grow to its full blossoming in a sense of pure and constant unity.” (CWM 14: 172)

“And as with happenings, so with persons, equality brings an entire change of the view and the attitude. The first result of the equal mind and spirit is to bring about an increasing charity and inner toleration of all persons, ideas, views, actions, because it is seen that God is in all beings and each acts according to his nature, his svabhava, and its present formulations. When there is the positive equal Ananda, this deepens to a sympathetic understanding and in the end an equal universal love.” (CWSA 24: 727)

“What then will be the divine nature, what will be the greater state of consciousness and being of the bhakta who has followed this way and turned to the adoration of the Eternal? The Gita in a number of verses rings the changes on its first insistent demand, on equality, on desirelessness, on freedom of spirit. This is to be the base always,—and that was why so much stress was laid on it in the beginning. And in that equality bhakti, the love and adoration of the Purushottama must rear the spirit towards some greatest highest perfection of which this calm equality will be the wide foundation. Several formulas of this fundamental equal consciousness are given here. First, an absence of egoism, of Iness and my-ness, nirmamo nirahankarah. The bhakta of the Purushottama is one who has a universal heart and mind which has broken down all the narrow walls of the ego. A universal love dwells in his heart, a universal compassion flows from it like an encompassing sea. He will have friendship and pity for all beings and hate for no living thing: for he is patient, longsuffering, enduring, a well of forgiveness. A desireless content is his, a tranquil equality to pleasure and pain, suffering and happiness, the steadfast control of self and the firm unshakable will and resolution of the Yogin and a love and devotion which gives up the whole mind and reason to the Lord, to the Master of his consciousness and knowledge. Or, simply, he will be one who is freed from the troubled agitated lower nature and from its waves of joy and fear and anxiety and resentment and desire, a spirit of calm by whom the world is not afflicted or troubled, nor is he afflicted or troubled by the world, a soul of peace with whom all are at peace.” (CWSA 19: 403–404)

22. Quiet and calm have to be increased

“The quiet and calm have to be increased so as to be a firm basis for the love and Ananda.” (CWSA 29: 141)

“If truly you love the Divine, prove it by remaining quiet and peaceful. All that comes to each one in life, comes from the Divine to teach us a lesson, and if we take it in the right spirit, we make rapid progress.

Try to do so.” (CWM 14: 219)

“If one has bhakti and aspires in the heart’s silence, if there is the true love for the Divine, then the nature will open of itself, there will be the true experience and the Mother’s power working within you, and the necessary knowledge will come.” (CWSA 29: 227)

“Active experience of the joy, peace, love, etc. when the direct contact is there; but even when it is not there, a quiet mind, heart and vital waiting and aspiring for the contact and the Presence—this should always be the condition.” (CWSA 29: 155)

“A veil behind the heart, a lid over the mind divide us from the Divine. Love and devotion rend the veil, in the quietude of the mind the lid thins and vanishes.” (CWSA 35: 839)

“Q: How to get pure and complete devotion?

A: Get quiet first—then from the quietude aspire and open yourself quietly and sincerely to the Mother.” (CWSA 32: 477–478)

23. Sense of gratitude that the Divine exists should constantly accompany devotion

“Now, we have put “devotion” in this series. Yes, devotion is all very well, but unless it is accompanied by many other things it too may make many mistakes. It may meet with great difficulties.

You have devotion, and you keep your ego. And then your ego makes you do all sorts of things out of devotion, things which are terribly egoistic. That is to say, you think only of yourself, not of others, nor of the world, nor of the work, nor of what ought to be done—you think only of your devotion. And you become tremendously egoistic. And so, when you find out that the Divine, for some reason, does not answer to your devotion with the enthusiasm you expected of Him, you despair and fall back into the same three difficulties I was just speaking about: either the Divine is cruel—we have read that, there are many such stories, of enthusiastic devotees who abuse the Divine because He is no longer as gentle and near to them as before, He has withdrawn, ‘Why hast Thou deserted me? Thou hast abandoned me, O monster!...’ They don’t dare to say this, but think it, or else they say, ‘Oh! I must have made such a serious mistake that I am thrown out’, and they fall into despair.

But there is another movement which should constantly accompany devotion.... That kind of sense of gratitude that the Divine exists; that feeling of a marvelling thankfulness which truly fills you with a sublime joy at the fact that the Divine exists, that there is something in the universe which is the Divine, that it is not just the monstrosity we see, that there is the Divine, the Divine exists. And each time that the least thing puts you either directly or indirectly in contact with this sublime Reality of divine existence, the heart is filled with so intense, so marvellous a joy, such a gratitude as of all things has the most delightful taste.

There is nothing which gives you a joy equal to that of gratitude. One hears a bird sing, sees a lovely flower, looks at a little child, observes an act of generosity, reads a beautiful sentence, looks at the setting sun, no matter what, suddenly this comes upon you, this kind of emotion—indeed so deep, so intense—that the world manifests the Divine, that there is something behind the world which is the Divine.

So I find that devotion without gratitude is quite incomplete, gratitude must come with devotion.” (CWM 8: 39–40)

“So here’s my proposal: we put surrender first, at the top of the list, that is, we accept what Sri Aurobindo has said—that to do the integral yoga one must first resolve to surrender entirely to the Divine, there is no other way, this is the way. But after that one must have the five psychological virtues, five psychological perfections, and we say that these perfections are:

Sincerity or Transparency

Faith or Trust (Trust in the Divine, naturally)

Devotion or Gratitude

Courage or Aspiration

Endurance or Perseverance.” (CWM 8: 42)

24. Intense love is possible before realisation

“Your supposition [that one cannot love the Divine until one experiences him] conflicts with the experience of many sadhaks. I think Ramakrishna indicated somewhere that the love and joy and ardour of seeking was much more intense than that of fulfilment. I don’t agree, but that shows at least that intense love is possible before realisation.” (CWSA 30: 8)

“My point is that there have been hundreds of Bhaktas who have the love and seeking without any concrete experience, with only a mental conception or emotional belief in the Divine to support them. The whole point is that it is untrue to say that one must have a decisive or concrete experience before one can have love for the Divine. It is contrary to the facts and the quite ordinary facts of the spiritual experience.” (CWSA 30: 8)

25. Feel the Divine Mother’s presence, turn to her at all times, be aware of her force moving, guiding, helping

Q: … ‘an inner close relation’ with the Mother. I want to know what is the truest and most real relation with her.

A: An inner (soul) relation means that one feels the Mother’s presence, is turned to her at all times, is aware of her force moving, guiding, helping, is full of love for her and always feels a great nearness whether one is physically near her or not—this relation takes up the mind, vital and inner physical till one feels one’s mind close to the Mother’s mind, one’s vital in harmony with hers, one’s very physical consciousness full of her. These are all the elements of the inner union, not only in the spirit and self but in the nature.” (CWSA 32: 453–454)

“What I want of you is not to love the Mother from a distance, but to become accustomed to feel her presence, her help, the working of her forces even when she is not physically present and this not only in your sleep or inward-drawn condition (which seems to be sufficiently easy for you) but in your waking consciousness whether in meditation or in ordinary hours. And this I want because it would give a great push to your Yoga. It would besides give a deeper meaning and power to your physical contact with her. I am sure that all this will come fully in time.” (CWSA 32: 462)

“You are the Mother’s child and the Mother’s love to her children is without limit and she bears patiently with the defects of their nature. Try to be the true child of the Mother: it is there within you, but your outward mind is occupied by little futile things and too often in a violent fuss over them. You must not only see the Mother in dream but learn to see and feel her with you and within you at all times. Then you would find it easier to control yourself and change,—for she being there would be able to do it for you.” (CWSA 32: 452–453)

“What happens in such cases is that when someone is accepted, the Mother sends out something of herself to him and this is with him wherever he goes and is always in connection with her being here. So when he does anything like what you did in this case with faith and bhakti, it reaches, through that emanation of herself which is with him, the Mother’s consciousness inner or outer and the Force goes in return for the result.” (CWSA 32: 240)

26. Developing the ability to See the Mother

“Mother said she would try to make you see her because it is not always easy for people to see her even when she is near them. It is also easier to see with eyes shut than with eyes open— though this too is possible—because it is a sight within you that has to open in order to see her. It is not necessary to call her for any fixed number of hours. It is enough if you love her always, remember her often, sit every day a little time before her photograph and call her.” (CWSA 32: 283)

27. Give your love without asking for anything at all except the inner nearness

“There are always in a sadhak two sides of the nature, one that wants the Divine, the other that wants only its own way and will and expects the Divine to satisfy it. When you were in the first, the Mother was always close to you and you were happy; when you indulged the second, then all went wrong. Your mistake recently has been to indulge this second part too much.

But you can always recover the constant closeness of the Mother in your inner being and happiness and progress in the sadhana. But to do so you must make it a point to give your love without asking for anything at all except the inner nearness—for unless you do that very strongly, it will be difficult for you to get rid of the other tendency and change the demanding vital part in you.” (CWSA 32: 475)

28. Put yourself into the Mother’s hands and let her guide you and to follow her will — make yourself a channel for the will of the Mother

“The contact between mother and child means not only that the mother should love the child but that the child should love the mother and obey her. You want to be the true child of the Mother, but the first thing for that is to put yourself into her hands and let her guide you and to follow her will—and not disregard it or revolt against her. You know all this perfectly well—why do you ignore it?

It is part of the true Mother’s love not to do whatever the vital of the child demands, for she knows that it would be extremely bad for him. Do not obey the impulse of the vital, but follow rather your true perception and make yourself a channel for the will of the Mother—because her will is always that you should grow into your true being.” (CWSA 32: 460)

29. When love comes, try and pierce through its outer appearance and find the divine principle which is behind and which gives it existence

30. One must learn how to love better: to love with devotion, with self-giving, self-abnegation

“To want to get rid of the one in order to find the other is very difficult. It is almost impossible. For human nature is so limited, so full of contradictions and so exclusive in its movements that if one wants to reject love in its lower form, that is to say, human love as human beings experience it, if one makes an inner effort to reject it, one usually rejects the entire capacity of feeling love and becomes like a stone. And then sometimes one has to wait for years or centuries before there is a reawakening in oneself of the capacity to receive and manifest love.

Therefore, the best way when love comes, in whatever form it may be, is to try and pierce through its outer appearance and find the divine principle which is behind and which gives it existence. Naturally, it is full of snares and difficulties, but it is more effective. That is to say, instead of ceasing to love because one loves wrongly, one must cease to love wrongly and want to love well.

For instance, love between human beings, in all its forms, the love of parents for children, of children for parents, of brothers and sisters, of friends and lovers, is all tainted with ignorance,  selfishness and all the other defects which are man’s ordinary drawbacks; so instead of completely ceasing to love—which, besides, is very difficult as Sri Aurobindo says, which would simply dry up the heart and serve no end—one must learn how to love better: to love with devotion, with self-giving, self-abnegation, and to struggle, not against love itself, but against its   distorted forms: against all forms of monopolising, of attachment, possessiveness, jealousy, and all the feelings which accompany these main movements. …

… As for yoga we may add something else: it is as I said in the beginning, the will to pierce through this limited and human form of love and discover the principle of divine Love which is behind it. Then one is sure to get a result. This is better than drying up one’s heart. It is perhaps a little more difficult but it is better in every way, for like this, instead of egoistically making others suffer, well, one may leave them quiet in their own movement and only make an effort to transform oneself without imposing one’s will on others, which even in ordinary life is a step towards something higher and a little more harmonious.” (CWM 8: 301—302)

“Q: It is said that to become conscious of divine Love all other love has to be abandoned. What is the best way of rejecting the other love which clings so obstinately (laughter) and does not easily leave us?

A: To go through it. Ah!

To go through, to see what is behind it, not to stop at the appearance, not to be satisfied with the outer form, to look for the principle which is behind this love, and not be content until one has found the origin of the feeling in oneself. Then the outer form will crumble of itself and you will be in contact with the divine Love which is behind all things.

That is the best way.” (CWM 8: 300—301)

31. Increasing your remembrance of the Divine must be a movement of love and joy

“Q: Often in the beginning of the action this can be done; but as one gets engrossed in the work, one forgets. How is one to remember?

A: The condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the final perfection and attainment, for which all else is only a preparation, is a consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support.

In the beginning of the Yoga you are apt to forget the Divine very often. But by constant aspiration you increase your remembrance and you diminish the forgetfulness. But this should not be done as a severe discipline or a duty; it must be a movement of love and joy. Then very soon a stage will come when, if you do not feel the presence of the Divine at every moment and whatever you are doing, you feel at once lonely and sad and miserable.

Whenever you find that you can do something without feeling the presence of the Divine and yet be perfectly comfortable, you must understand that you are not consecrated in that part of your being. That is the way of the ordinary humanity which does not feel any need of the Divine. But for a seeker of the Divine Life it is very different. And when you have entirely realised unity with the Divine, then, if the Divine were only for a second to withdraw from you, you would simply drop dead; for the Divine is now the Life of your life, your whole existence, your single and complete support. If the Divine is not there, nothing is left.” (CWM 3: 26-27)

“But it may be that even this constant remembering of God and lifting up of our works to him is felt to be beyond the power of the limited mind, because in its forgetfulness it turns to the act and its outward object and will not remember to look within and lay our every movement on the divine altar of the Spirit. Then the way is to control the lower self in the act and do works without desire of the fruit. All fruit has to be renounced, to be given up to the Power that directs the work, and yet the work has to be done that is imposed by It on the nature. For by this means the obstacle steadily diminishes and easily disappears; the mind is left free to remember the Lord and to fix itself in the liberty of the divine consciousness.” (CWSA 19: 403)

“Q: In a letter about work Sri Aurobindo says: ‘As for the dedication make the sankalpa always of offering it, remember and pray when you can. . . . This is to fix a certain attitude. Afterwards, the Force can take advantage of this key to open the deeper dedication within.’ May I know in what terms this deeper dedication can be expressed?

A: One begins to feel a double consciousness, one an inner being within which is always dedicated, spontaneously and silently full of the devotion to the Mother or aware of her Force working or of her presence or all these together and another the outer through which the work is done.” (CWSA 32: 244)

32. Repetition of the name of the Divine for increase of bhakti

“The name of the Divine is usually called in for protection, for adoration, for increase of bhakti, for the opening up of the inner consciousness, for the realisation of the Divine in that aspect.” (CWSA 29: 327)

“As a rule the only mantra used in this sadhana is that of the Mother or of my name and the Mother. The concentration in the heart and the concentration in the head can both be used —each has its own result. The first opens up the psychic being and brings bhakti, love and union with the Mother, her presence within the heart and the action of her Force in the nature.” (CWSA 29: 326)

33. Concentrate at the Samadhi to grow in devotion

“One concentrates at the Samadhi to grow in devotion and to put oneself in contact with Sri Aurobindo in order to receive his help.” (CWM 16: 397)

“You may sit by the Ganges or the Narmada near some quiet temple or in some sacred asram to adore the Lord; for to the Karmayogin also bhakti is necessary, and places like these which are saturated with the bhakti of great saints and impassioned God-lovers best feed and strengthen the impulse of adoration in the soul. But if Karmayoga be your path, you must come back and live again in the stir of the world.” (CWSA 17: 195)

34. Rise above attachments

“To love truly the Divine we must rise above attachments.” (CWM 14: 131)

35. A tireless benevolence, clear-seeing and comprehensive, free from all personal reaction

“A tireless benevolence, clear-seeing and comprehensive, free from all personal reaction, is the best way to love God and serve Him upon earth.” (CWM 14: 187)

36. Efface the stamp of ego from the heart and let the love of the Mother take its place

“Efface the stamp of ego from the heart and let the love of the Mother take its place.” (CWSA 32: 246)

“Q: How shall I be able to judge that I am in the full state of psychic love?

A: By the absence of ego, by pure devotion, by submission and surrender to the Divine.” (CWSA 32: 467)

“If one does not take care of one’s ego from the beginning, it may develop into a strong spiritual ego which says, ‘I am progressing wonderfully; the Grace is with me. I am the Mother’s instrument more than others.’ It may demand that the Mother show some special Grace to it. This ego wants to show others that ‘Mother loves me more than all of you’, and it wants a physical manifestation of her love.

You are quite right. It is the ego that wants the satisfaction of being the first or specially singled out. It is this egoistic vital demand with all its consequent revolts and disturbances that made it necessary for Mother to limit the physical manifestation of nearness to a minimum.” (CWSA 32: 497)

“What is the use of talking about divine Love if one can’t love without egoism?" (CWM 9: 71)

“I had already written to you strongly approving of that way. It is in our Yoga the way to devotion and surrender —for it is the psychic movement that brings the constant and pure devotion and the removal of ego that makes it possible to surrender. The two things indeed go together.” (CWSA 29: 210)

“Vital power is necessary for work and you have an exceptional amount of it. Of course, to make a full Yogic use of it and of its force for action, the ego must gradually fade out and vital attachments and impulses be replaced by the spiritual motive. Bhakti, devotion to the Divine, and the spirit of service to the Divine are among the most powerful means for this change.” (CWSA 29: 245—246)

37. Fix the mind on the idea of Divine love - we can come to the knowledge of Divine love - put ourselves into communion with it

38. Concentrate the whole being with thoughts of the object of devotion, its forms, its essence, its attributes and the joys of adoration and union

39. Thought is then made the servant of love

“… Yoga takes this higher working of Nature and carries it to its full possibilities. It takes note of the fact that by fixing the mind luminously on a single object of thought, we awaken a response in general Consciousness which proceeds to satisfy the mind by pouring into it knowledge about that object or even reveals to us its central or its essential truth. We awaken also a response of Power which gives us in various ways an increasing mastery over the workings of that on which we meditate or enables us to create it and make it active in ourselves. Thus by fixing the mind on the idea of Divine Love, we can come to the knowledge of that principle and its workings, put ourselves into communion with it, create it in ourselves and impose its law on the heart and the senses.” (CWSA 13: 445–446)

“In Yoga concentration is used also for another object,— to retire from the waking state, which is a limited and superficial condition of our consciousness, into the depths of our being measured by various states of Samadhi. For this process contemplation of the single object, idea or name is more powerful than the succession of concentrated thoughts. The latter, however, is capable, by bringing us into indirect but waking communion with the deeper states of being, of preparing an integral Samadhi. …

In the Yoga of Devotion, both processes are equally used to concentrate the whole being or to saturate the whole nature with thoughts of the object of devotion, its forms, its essence, its attributes and the joys of adoration and union. Thought is then made the servant of Love, a preparer of Beatitude.” (CWSA 13: 446)

40. The Mother’s presence can be felt through the photograph by one who regards it with devotion towards her

“Your experience about the photograph was a very fine and true experience. The Mother’s presence can be felt through the photograph by one who regards it with devotion towards her. It was her true presence that was there, her subtle physical presence and all you felt was true. It shows that your physical mind is opening to the true consciousness. It is quite sure that this will grow and the remnants of the old movements are bound to disappear.” (CWSA 32: 184)

“The photograph is a vehicle only3—but if you have the right consciousness, then you can bring something of the living being into it or become aware of the being for which it stands and can make it a means of contact. It is like the pranapratistha in the image in the temple.” (CWSA 29: 362)

{3 While looking at a photograph of Sri Aurobindo, the correspondent felt that he was looking at a living being with eyes “as living as real eyes”.—Ed.}

41. Meditation will be most profitable if it is directed towards the increase of love

“It is not at all a fact that your nature is incapable of love and bhakti; on the contrary that is the right way for you. Meditation is all right, but it will be most profitable for you if it is directed towards the increase of love and devotion; the rest will come of itself afterwards.” (CWSA 31: 110)

VIII—How to Increase the Love for the Divine

1. Aspire for intense love

“The intense love and bhakti does not come at once. It comes as the power of the psychic grows more and more in the being. But to aspire for it is right and the sincere aspiration is sure to fulfil itself. Always seek to progress in quietude, happiness and confidence, that is the most helpful attitude.” (CWSA 31: 702–703)

“It is to the sincerity of your aspiration that the Love answers spontaneously.” (CWM 14: 72)

“The essential difference between love in aspiration and love in desire is that love in aspiration gives itself entirely and asks nothing in return—it does not claim anything; whereas love in desire gives itself as little as possible, asks as much as possible, it pulls things to itself and always makes demands.” (CWM 4: 136)

“What you have to aspire to is bhakti, purification of the nature, right psychic consciousness and surrender. Aspire for bhakti and it will grow in you. It is already there within and it is that which expresses itself in your poetry and music and the feelings that rise up as in the temple of the Mother at the Cape. As the bhakti and aspiration in the nature grow, the right psychic consciousness will also increase and lead to the full surrender.” (CWSA 35: 629)

“You must aspire especially for ... for a deep and intense but quiet devotion.” (CWSA 31: 124)

2. Where external worship changes into the inner adoration, real Bhakti begins

3. That love leads to the joy of closeness in our relations with the Divine

“But worship is only the first step on the path of devotion. Where external worship changes into the inner adoration, real Bhakti begins; that deepens into the intensity of divine love; that love leads to the joy of closeness in our relations with the Divine; the joy of closeness passes into the bliss of union.” (CWSA 24: 549)

4. The process of self-giving to the Eternal leads to most profound God love

“Every moment and every movement of our being is to be resolved into a continuous and a devoted self-giving to the Eternal.... Our very inspiration and respiration, our very heart-beats can and must be made conscious in us as the living rhythm of the universal sacrifice. … It is evident, to begin with, that, even if such a discipline is begun without devotion, it leads straight and inevitably towards the highest devotion possible; for it must deepen naturally into the completest adoration imaginable, the most profound God-love.” (CWSA 23: 111–112)

5. More the flow of devotion and love repeats is bound to overflow to all the parts of being

“The flow of devotion and love is a thing which the more it repeats or awakens is bound to overflow to all the parts of being and have its effect on them.” (CWSA 29: 354–355)

“The ordinary Bhakta is not a lion heart. The lion hearts get experiences comparatively soon but the ordinary Bhakta has often to feed on his own love or yearning for years and years— and he does it.” (CWSA 30: 8)

6. The habit of love enhances my power of love

“The habit of love confirms and enhances my power of love; it purifies my being and opens it to the universal good. The habit of hatred on the contrary corrupts my being, fills it with poison, with bad and morbid toxic matter, and opens it to the general power of evil. My love ought also by a prolongation or a return to produce love in others and my hatred to give rise to hatred; that happens to a certain, a great extent, but it need not be and is not an invariable or rigorous consequence; still we may well see and believe that love does throw out widening ripples and helps to elevate the world while hatred has the opposite consequence. But what is the necessary connection between this good and evil on the one hand and on the other pleasure and pain? Must the ethical power always turn perfectly into some term of kindred hedonistic result? Not entirely; for love is a joy in itself, but also love suffers; hatred is a troubled and self-afflicting thing, but has too its own perverse delight of itself and its gratifications; but in the end we may say that love, because it is born of the universal Delight, triumphs in its own nature and hatred because it is its denial or perversion, leads to a greater sum of misery to myself as to others.” (CWSA 13: 371–372)

7. When the psychic intensifies its influence, this love for the Mother becomes strong

“Both the love for the Mother which you feel so strongly and the other tendency of harmony and affection with those with whom you live or work come from the psychic being. When the psychic intensifies its influence, this love for the Mother becomes strong and is the main mover of the nature. But there is also a feeling of good will, harmony, kindness or affection towards others which also comes up and is not so much personal as the result of the soul’s inmost relation to all souls who are children of the Mother. There is no harm in this psychic feeling, on the contrary it creates happiness and harmony—it is only the vital love between persons that has to be rejected because it draws away from full consecration to the Divine. But this helps the growth of the soul into the Mother’s consciousness and helps the work and helps also the inner life to grow.” (CWSA 32: 463)

“Love and devotion depend on the opening of the psychic and for that the desires must go. The vital love offered by many to the Mother instead of the psychic love brings more disturbance than anything else because it is coupled with desire.” (CWSA 32: 475)

8. When the vital joins in the love for the Divine, it brings into it heroism, enthusiasm, intensity

“When the vital joins in the love for the Divine, it brings into it heroism, enthusiasm, intensity, absoluteness, exclusiveness, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the total and passionate self-giving of all the nature. It is the vital passion for the Divine that creates the spiritual heroes, conquerors or martyrs.” (SABCL 23: 758–759)

“Flaming love for the Divine: ready for all heroism and all sacrifice.” (CWM 14: 131)

9. The heart must be free from the obsessions of the body if love is to increase

“Freedom is the first requisite of full working power, the freedom of the higher from the lower. The mind must be free from the body if it is to be purified from the grossness which clogs its motions, the heart must be free from the obsessions of the body if love and high aspiration are to increase, the reason must be free from the heart and the lower mind if it is to reflect perfectly, for the heart can inspire, it cannot think, it is a vehicle of direct knowledge coloured by emotion, not of ratiocination.” (CWSA 12: 24)

10. By the force of your devotion your contact with the Divine Mother will become intimate

“But a time will come when you will feel more and more that you are the instrument and not the worker. For first by the force of your devotion your contact with the Divine Mother will become so intimate that at all times you will have only to concentrate and to put everything into her hands to have her present guidance, her direct command or impulse, the sure indication of the thing to be done and the way to do it and the result.” (CWSA 32: 12)

11. Through music bhakti can grow

“About sadhana I should like to ask you: why not do sadhana through your music? Surely meditation is not the only way of doing sadhana. Through your music bhakti and aspiration can grow and prepare the nature for realisation.” (CWM 12: 237)

IX—The Psychic Love

1. The psychic seeks Divine love

“But the most intimate character of the psychic is its pressure towards the Divine through a sacred love, joy and oneness. It is a divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the new-born godhead within us. ” (CWSA 23: 155)

2. Psychic emerging admits the human emotional activities so that they are turned towards the Divine

“At once, emerging, [Psychic] it is ready and eager to break all the old ties and imperfect emotional activities and replace them by a greater spiritual Truth of love and oneness. It may still admit the human forms and movements, but on condition that they are turned towards the One alone. It accepts only the ties that are helpful, the heart’s and mind’s reverence for the Guru, the union of the God-seekers, a spiritual compassion for this ignorant human and animal world and its peoples, the joy and happiness and satisfaction of beauty that comes from the perception of the Divine everywhere.” (CWSA 23: 155–156)

3. Egoism, altruism or philanthropy will not deceive or divert psychic from its sacred longing

“It [psychic] plunges the nature inward towards its meeting with the immanent Divine in the heart’s secret centre and, while that call is there, no reproach of egoism, no mere outward summons of altruism or duty or philanthropy or service will deceive or divert it from its sacred longing and its obedience to the attraction of the Divinity within it.” (CWSA 23: 156–157)

4. Psychic calls down transcendent love to deliver this world of hatred and strife

It [psychic] lifts the being towards a transcendent Ecstasy and is ready to shed all the downward pull of the world from its wings in its uprising to reach the One Highest; but it calls down also this transcendent Love and Beatitude to deliver and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and jarring Ignorance.” (CWSA 23: 156–157)

5. Psychic opens to a universal Divine Love for the redemption of the world from the universal Inconscience

“It [psychic] opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all, for the embrace of the World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion that has plunged into the night for the redemption of the world from the universal Inconscience.” (CWSA 23: 156–157)

6. Psychic calls down the truth of Divine love to heal from mental imitations or vital misuse of deep-seated Truths

“It [psychic] is not attracted or misled by mental imitations or any vital misuse of these great deep-seated Truths of existence; it exposes them with its detecting search-ray and calls down the entire truth of divine Love to heal these malformations, to deliver mental, vital, physical love from their insufficiencies or their perversions and reveal to them their true abounding share of the intimacy and the oneness, the ascending ecstasy and the descending rapture.” (CWSA 23: 156-157)

7. All true Truth of love and of the works of love the psychic being accepts

“All true Truth of love and of the works of love the psychic being accepts in their place: but its flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns it into a stake of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.” (CWSA 23: 157)

8. Love, compassion, kindness, bhakti, ananda are the nature of the psychic being

“These things, love, compassion, kindness, bhakti, Ananda are the nature of the psychic being, because the psychic being is formed from the Divine Consciousness, it is the divine part within you.” (CWSA 28: 122)

“Love, joy and happiness come from the psychic. The Self gives peace or a universal Ananda.” (CWSA 28: 106)

“That is why we insist on the psychic transformation as the first necessity—for that does change the nature—and its chief instrument is bhakti, surrender etc.” (CWSA 31: 617)

9. The psychic being feels the union with the Divine Mother

“It is the psychic being that feels love, bhakti and union with the Mother.” (CWSA 28: 93-94)

10. Part on any plane (physical, vital or mental) which is open to the psychic influence aspires for love

“Which part of the being aspires for love, for peace?

It is that part on any plane (physical, vital or mental) which is open to the psychic influence.” (CWM 17: 75)

11. Through love and surrender to the Divine the psychic being manifest, so that it can replace the ego

“It is the psychic inmost being that replaces the ego. It is through love and surrender to the Divine that the psychic being becomes strong and manifest, so that it can replace the ego.” (CWSA 28: 124)

12. Psychic love is always peaceful and joyous

“Psychic love is always peaceful and joyous; it is the vital which dramatises and makes itself unhappy without any reason. I hope, indeed, that you will soon become conscious of my presence always near you, and that it will give you peace and joy.” (CWM 16: 171-172)

13. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled which can seize hold on the truth of the Divine love

“It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind’s and the life’s falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind’s ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure. ” (CWSA 23: 167)

14. The leading of the inmost psychic being is not found sufficient until it has succeeded in raising itself to the highest spiritual levels

“And yet even the leading of the inmost psychic being is not found sufficient until it has succeeded in raising itself out of this mass of inferior Nature to the highest spiritual levels and the divine spark and flame descended here have rejoined themselves to their original fiery Ether. … Or at any rate it will be possible for our spiritual consciousness to raise itself out of mind into the supramental Light and Force and Vastness; there in the light and potency of the supramental Gnosis are the splendour and joy of a power of divine self-expression and self-organisation which could rescue and re-create even the world of the Ignorance into a figure of the Truth of the Spirit.” (CWSA 23: 168)

15. Psychic love can change the vital love into something great and beautiful

“Psychic love is quite satisfying, and it can change even the vital love into something great and beautiful.” (CWSA 29: 336)

16. The divine love which emerges from purification of psychic fire will be potent for the perfectibility of life — creates a harmony in the world

“It is the inner offering of the heart’s adoration, the soul of it in the symbol, the spirit of it in the act, that is the very life of the sacrifice. If this offering is to be complete and universal, then a turning of all our emotions to the Divine is imperative. This is the intensest way of purification for the human heart, more powerful than any ethical or aesthetic catharsis could ever be by its half-power and superficial pressure. A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine perversions are burned away and the others discard their insufficiencies, till a spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the divine love which so emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be. It is this poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in terrestrial Nature.” (CWSA 23: 165-166)

17. Psychic love is pure and full of self-giving without egoistic demand

“The psychic love is pure and full of self-giving without egoistic demand, but it is human and can err and suffer. The Divine Love is something much vaster and deeper and full of light and ananda.” (CWSA 29: 336)

“When there is no demand or desire, only love and self-giving, that is the psychic love.” (CWSA 29: 336)

18. Love and devotion to the Divine is the central feeling of the psychic nature

“Love and devotion to the Divine is the central feeling of the psychic nature and that is growing in you towards the Mother, pervading your being. A psychic love towards all is also emerging; this love is a thing inward and does not seek to express itself outwardly like the vital love which men usually have.” (CWSA 30: 358)

“The psychic stands behind the being—a simple and sincere devotion to the Divine, single-hearted, an immediate sense of what is right and helps towards the Truth and the Divine, an instinctive withdrawal from all that is the opposite are its most visible characteristics.” (CWSA 28: 120)

“The psychic is realised as the Purusha behind the heart. … Its realisation brings Bhakti, self-giving, surrender, turning of all the movements Godward, discrimination and choice of all that belongs to the Divine Truth, … union through love and sympathy with all existence, openness to the Truth of the Self and the Divine.” (CWSA 28: 106-107)

19. The psychic being has only aspirations and a seeking and love for the Divine

“When the psychic being is in front, then also to get rid of desire becomes easy; for the psychic being has in itself no desires, it has only aspirations and a seeking and love for the Divine and all things that are or tend towards the Divine.” (CWSA 31: 265)

20. Psychic love has warmth and a flame more intense than the vital, it is a pure fire

“A clear limpid goodwill is a very good and desirable thing—one has only to consider what a changed place the Asram would be if all had it for each other. But that is not what is meant by psychic love. Love is love and not merely goodwill. Psychic love can have a warmth and a flame as intense and more intense than the vital, only it is a pure fire, not dependent on the satisfaction of ego-desire or on the eating up of the fuel it embraces. It is a white flame, not a red one; but white heat is not inferior to the red variety in its ardour.” (CWSA 31: 307)

21. Psychic love finds the fullness of its fire and ecstasy when it is lifted towards the Divine

“It is true that the psychic love does not usually get its full play in human relations and human nature, it finds the fullness of its fire and ecstasy more easily when it is lifted towards the Divine.” (CWSA 31: 307-308)

22. All the finer sweetness, tenderness, fidelity, self-giving, self-sacrifice, reachings of soul to soul, idealising sublimations that lift up human love beyond itself come from the psychic

“In the human relation the psychic love gets mixed up with other elements which seek at once to use it and overshadow it. It gets an outlet for its own full intensities only at rare moments. Otherwise it comes in only as an element, but even so it contributes all the higher things in a love that is predominantly vital—all the finer sweetness, tenderness, fidelity, self-giving, self-sacrifice, reachings of soul to soul, idealising sublimations that lift up human love beyond itself come from the psychic. If it could dominate and govern and transmute the other elements, mental, vital, physical, of human love, then love could be on the earth some reflection or preparation of the real thing, an integral union of the soul and its instruments in a dual life. But even some imperfect appearance of that is rare.” (CWSA 31: 307-308)

23. Affection, love, tenderness are in their nature psychic

“Affection, love, tenderness are in their nature psychic,— the vital has them because the psychic is trying to express itself through the vital. It is through the emotional being that the psychic most easily expresses, for it stands just behind it in the heart centre.” (CWSA 31: 284)

24. Psychic love is essentially a permanent soul sympathy which is not attached but self-existent and self-content pouring itself out

“The emotional feeling is safe only when it is governed by the psychic—for the psychic love is essentially a permanent soul sympathy which is not attached but self-existent and self-content pouring itself out but asking for nothing.” (CWSA 31: 316)

25. Full state of psychic love is judged by the absence of ego, by pure devotion, by submission and surrender to the Divine

“Q: How shall I be able to judge that I am in the full state of psychic love?

A: By the absence of ego, by pure devotion, by submission and surrender to the Divine.” (CWSA 32: 467)

26. The psychic is made up of love and self-giving without demand

“Q: What is the character of psychic bhakti, mental bhakti and vital bhakti for the Mother? How to recognise them?

A: The psychic is made up of love and self-giving without demand, the vital of the will to be possessed by the Mother and serve her, the mental of faith and unquestioning acceptance of all that the Mother is, says and does. These however are outside signs—it is in inner character quite recognisable but not to be put into words that they differ.” (CWSA 32: 477)

27. Psychic weeping is a weeping from the soul deep within, tears of the soul’s yearning, of sorrow for the resistance of Nature, of joy or love or bhakti

“Psychic weeping, a weeping from the soul deep within, tears of the soul’s yearning, of sorrow for the resistance of Nature, of joy or love or bhakti does not cause a fall, it can help and open up the inner soul from its veils; but this weeping has no strain or suffering in it, it is something very deep and quiet and brings a sense of purification and release. That is not so with the weeping which comes from the vital and is born of hurt or abhiman or disappointment or shakes or disturbs the nature.” (CWSA 32: 512)

“I often mark that when an inner love springs out for the divinity, tears follow.

These are psychic tears of devotion etc.” (CWSA 32: 468)

28. Suffering of a psychic character comes from divine compassion is full of peace and strength, it consoles and cures and illumines

“The other category of suffering, whose initial cause is the pain of separation created by the adversary, is totally opposite in nature: it is the suffering that comes from divine compassion, the suffering of love that feels compassion for the world’s misery, whatever its origin, cause or effect. But this suffering, which is of a purely psychic character, contains no egoism, no self-pity; it is full of peace and strength and power of action, of faith in the future and the will for victory; it does not pity but consoles, it does not identify itself with the ignorant movement in others but cures and illumines it.” (CWM 15: 338)

29. The Divine manifests in the psychic as love

“The Divine manifests in the psychic as love, …” (CWM 13: 372)

30. Psychic being and the mind, vital and physical which are under the control of the psychic being loves the [Divine] Mother

“It is your psychic being, like all psychic beings, that loves me.” (CWM 17: 106)

“… for the soul in you knows that it loves the Mother and the Mother loves you; it cannot be blinded by the suggestions that deceive the mind and the vital nature.” (CWSA 32: 455)

“Q: Is it only my psychic being that loves You?

A: To the extent that the mind, vital and physical are under the control of the psychic being, they also love me.” (CWM 17: 107)

“Do not think whether people agree with you or do not agree with you or whether you are good or bad, but think only that ‘the Mother loves me and I am the Mother’s.’ If you base your life on that thought, everything will soon become easy.” (CWSA 32: 480)

“It is because of the thoughts about others and your ‘badness’ that you feel far from the Mother. All the time she is very near to you and you to her. If you take the position I told you and make it the basis of your life, ‘the Mother loves me and I am hers’, the curtain would soon disappear, for it is made of these thoughts and nothing else.” (CWSA 32: 480)

31. Psychic being gives to man true love, charity, compassion, a deep kindness

“And this psychic being gives to man true love, charity, compassion, a deep kindness, which compensate for all his external defects.” (CWM 15: 360)

32. Psychic love is a form taken by divine love in the human being

“… psychic love is a form taken by divine love in the human being according to the needs and possibilities of the human consciousness.” (CWSA 29: 336)

33. The colour of the psychic is pink

“The colour of the psychic light is according to what it manifests —e.g., psychic love is pink or rose, the psychic purity is white etc.” (CWSA 30: 132)

“Reddish pink rose = psychic love or surrender.

White rose = pure spiritual surrender.” (CWSA 30: 180)

34. Other quotations on Psychic love

“Psychic love never bargains—but the vital always tries to derive some benefit for itself in all circumstances.” (CWM 17: 107)

“Why do you want something remarkable? The love of the soul is the true thing, simple and absolute—the rest is good only if it is a means of manifestation of the soul’s love.” (CWSA 29: 336)

“If love is psychic in its nature, it always brings the sense of oneness or at least of an inner intimate closeness of being. The Divine Love is based upon oneness and the psychic derives from the Divine Love.” (CWSA 29: 336)

Q: Is psychic bhakti perfect devotion?

A: It is the basis of perfect devotion.

Q: How can I develop psychic bhakti?

A: By sincere aspiration.” (CWSA 32: 477)

“The direct opening of the psychic centre is easy only when the ego-centricity is greatly diminished and also if there is a strong bhakti for the Mother. A spiritual humility and sense of submission and dependence is necessary.” (CWSA 32: 163)

“If you have touched true love through the psychic and the divine union, then the other thing appears hollow, thin, empty—an appearance and a comedy, more often tragic than comic.” (CWM 11: 23)

“Full trust with humility and devotion, that is the psychic poise and for nothing should it be lost. No satisfaction of vital desire can replace it.” (CWSA 32: 391)

“The rosy light is that of love—so probably you entered the psychic worlds—or at least one of them.” (CWSA 30: 132)

X—Love—Delight—Ananda

"... Love is an intense self-expression of the soul of Ananda ...” (CWSA 28: 6)

“I have said that about Love, the manifestation of Love which is the supreme Ananda. Sri Aurobindo also said it: beyond Being and Non-being there is something which is, which manifests as supreme Love, and which is at once Being and Non-being. And the first manifestation of That is the Ananda of identity—essentially it is the identity becoming aware of itself in Ananda, and then, it makes the full circuit through the whole manifestation and all the forms taken by Love, and returns to the Oneness through union. And this adds to that Ananda, the Ananda of union, which would never have existed if the circuit had not been made.” (CWM 8: 225)

When an individual breaks the narrow limitations of his ego through self-giving he foretaste the marvellous delight of love but it is a fleeting contact

“Each time an individual breaks the narrow limitations in which he is imprisoned by his ego and emerges into the open air, through self-giving, whether for the sake of another human being or his family, his country or his faith, he finds in this self-forgetfulness a foretaste of the marvellous delight of love, and this gives him the impression that he has come into contact with the Divine. But most often it is only a fleeting contact, for in the human being love is immediately mixed with lower egoistic movements which debase it and rob it of its power of purity. But even if it remained pure, this contact with the divine existence could not last for ever, for love is only one aspect of the Divine, an aspect which here on earth has suffered the same distortions as the others.” (CWM 12: 68)

“When there is the approach through the heart, through Love and Bhakti, its highest culmination is in a transcendent Ananda, an unspeakable Bliss or Beatitude of union with the Divine through Love.” (CWSA 29: 483)

“God is Sachchidananda. ...

This becomes still clearer if we consider the manifestation of Sachchidananda. In that manifestation Delight translates itself into Love; Consciousness translates itself into double terms, conceptive Knowledge, executive Force; Existence translates itself into Being, that is to say, into Person and Substance. But Love is incomplete without a Lover and an object of Love, Knowledge without a Knower and an object of Knowledge, Force without a Worker and a Work, Substance without a Person cognizing and constituting it.

This is because the original terms also are not really impersonal abstractions. In delight of Brahman there is an Enjoyer of delight, in consciousness of Brahman a Conscient, in existence of Brahman an Existent; but the object of Brahman’s delight and consciousness and the term and stuff of Its existence are Itself. In the divine Being Knowledge, the Knower and the Known and, therefore, necessarily also Delight, the Enjoyer and the Enjoyed are one.” (CWSA 17: 41-42)

“Ananda and bhakti are part of that deeper consciousness, and it is only when one lives in it and grows in it that ananda and bhakti can be permanent. Till then, one can only get experiences of ananda and bhakti, but not the constant and permanent state. But the state of bhakti and constantly growing surrender does not come to all at an early stage of the sadhana; many, most indeed, have a long journey of purification and tapasya to go through before it opens, and experiences of this kind, at first rare and interspaced, afterwards frequent, are the landmarks of their progress.” (CWSA 29: 352)

“The Divine is infinite and innumerable, and consequently the ways of approaching Him are also infinite and innumerable, and on the manner of one’s approach to the Divine depends what he receives and knows of the Divine. The bhakta meets a Divine full of affection and sweetness, the wise man will find a Divine full of wisdom and knowledge.” (CWM 16: 169)

“These are the seven ecstasies of Love —

The ecstasy of the body in the clasp of the Lover.

The ecstasy of the life consecrated and self-given to the Lord.

The ecstasy of the Mind made one in idea and [will] with the divine Consort.

The ecstasy of the supermind united with mind and body and enjoying the bliss of difference.

The ecstasy [of the] soul in the pure bliss of the Beatific.

The ecstasy of the spirit united in consciousness and force with the Universal.

The ecstasy of the pure being absolute and one with the Transcendent.” (CWSA 12: 348)

“There are three such characteristics which appear rudimentarily the moment consciousness itself appears and seem more and more pronounced as liberated Spirit develops to its highest self-expression. The first of the trio is the impulse of existence, the will to preserve self, to survive and be, not merely temporarily but unendingly. ... The second characteristic of consciousness is the capacity of knowledge or awareness, the Will to know. Showing itself at first physically in sensation and response to external objects, it develops psychically in personality with memory, its basis, and understanding, reason and intuition, its superstructure, and culminates spiritually in self-knowledge and the awareness of one’s own eternal and unabridged reality. The third characteristic of consciousness is the emotion of pleasure in existence, primarily in one’s own, sympathetically in all existence, the Will to enjoy. This is the most powerful and fundamental of emotions,—so powerful as to persistently outlast all the pain and struggle which the hampered existence of Spirit in Matter brings to the personality. Showing itself physically at first in mere sense-pleasure and the clinging to life, it develops psychically in the emotions of love and joy, and culminates spiritually in the delight of our psychical personality in contact with or entering into the impersonal existence of our real and infinite Self.” (CWSA 17: 266–267)

XI—Love—Oneness

1. Love brings us to a highest oneness with its greatest possible depth and intensity

“But worship is only the first step on the path of devotion. Where external worship changes into the inner adoration, real Bhakti begins; that deepens into the intensity of divine love; that love leads to the joy of closeness in our relations with the Divine; the joy of closeness passes into the bliss of union. Love too as well as knowledge brings us to a highest oneness and it gives to that oneness its greatest possible depth and intensity. It is true that love returns gladly upon a difference in oneness, by which the oneness itself becomes richer and sweeter. But here we may say that the heart is wiser than the thought, at least than that thought which fixes upon opposite ideas of the Divine and concentrates on one to the exclusion of the other which seems its contrary, but is really its complement and a means of its greatest fulfilment. This is the weakness of the mind that it limits itself by its thoughts, its positive and negative ideas, the aspects of the Divine Reality that it sees, and tends too much to pit one against the other.” (CWSA 24: 549)

2. Oneness is the highest spiritual experience

“The way of Bhakti … proceeds by worship which belongs to that stage of spiritual experience where there is a difference, an insufficient unity between the human soul and the Divine, because its very principle is love and love means always two, the lover and the beloved, a dualism therefore, while oneness is the highest spiritual experience, …” (CWSA 24: 548–549)

3. True function of heart is love and destined instrument of complete union and oneness

“For the main business of the heart, its true function is love. It is our destined instrument of complete union and oneness; for to see oneness in the world by the understanding is not enough unless we also feel it with the heart and in the psychic being, and this means a delight in the One and in all existences in the world in him, a love of God and all beings. The heart’s faith and will in good are founded on a perception of the one Divine immanent in all things and leading the world. The universal love has to be founded on the heart’s sight and psychical and emotional sense of the one Divine, the one Self in all existence.” (CWSA 24: 737)

4. Love attempts towards a oneness

“All true love … it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from which we have separated, a discovery of one’s self in others.” (CWSA 23: 107)

5. All love springs from a secret oneness in being

“All love is indeed in its nature self-existent because it springs from a secret oneness in being and a sense of that oneness or desire of oneness in the heart between souls that are yet able to conceive of themselves as different from each other and divided. Therefore all these other relations too can arrive at their self-existent motiveless joy of being for the sake of love alone.” (CWSA 24: 569)

6. Contact and Union with the Divine

“Seeing is of many kinds. There is a superficial seeing which only erects or receives momentarily or for some time an image of the Being seen; that brings no change, unless the inner bhakti makes it a means for change. There is also the reception of the living image of the Divine in one of his forms into oneself,—say, in the heart,—that can have an immediate effect or initiate a period of spiritual growth. There is also the seeing outside oneself in a more or less objective and subtle physical or physical way.

As for milana, the abiding union is within and that can be there at all times; the outer milana or contact is not usually abiding. There are some who often or almost invariably have the contact whenever they worship; the Deity may become living to them in the picture or other image they worship, may move and act through it; others may feel him always present, outwardly, subtle-physically, abiding with them where they live or in the very room; but sometimes this is only for a period. Or they may feel the Presence with them, see it frequently in a body (but not materially except sometimes), feel its touch or embrace, converse with it constantly,—that is also one kind of milana. The greatest milana is one in which one is constantly aware of the Deity constantly abiding in oneself, in everything in the world, holding all the world in him, identical with existence and yet supremely beyond the world—but in the world too one sees, hears, feels nothing but him, so that the very senses bear witness to him alone—and this does not exclude such specific personal manifestations as those vouchsafed to Krishnaprem and his guru. The more ways there are of the union, the better.” (CWSA 29: 362– 363)

XII—The Law of Love

“… the law of association and the law of love, of common help, kindliness, affection, comradeship, unity, who harmonise most successfully survival and mutual self-giving, the aggregate increasing the individual and the individual the aggregate, as well as individual increasing individual and aggregate aggregate by mutual interchange ...” (CWSA 21: 216)

“... self-giving and fusion with other individuals, is necessary for the working of the principle of love ...” (CWSA 21: 215)

“Thus love as a law of life can affirm itself practically as an inner active principle; but unless it occupies the whole substance of being, the entire individual feeling and action cannot be moulded by the law of love: even if perfected in the individual, it can be rendered unilateral and ineffective by the general nescience which is blind to it and hostile, or it is forced to circumscribe its range of cosmic application.” (CWSA 22: 996)

“Thus the law of love and sympathy is natural to our consciousness; as we grow in spirit, its demand on us increases: but there is also the demand of the intellect, the push of the vital force and its impulses in us, the claim and pressure of many other elements that do not coincide with the law of love and sympathy, nor do we know how to fit them all into the whole law of existence or to render any or all of them either justly and entirely effective or imperative. In order to make them concordant and actively fruitful in the whole being and whole life, we have to grow into a more complete spiritual nature; we have, by that growth, to live in the light and force of a higher and larger and more integral consciousness of which knowledge and power, love and sympathy and play of life-will are all natural and ever-present accorded elements; we have to move and act in a light of Truth which sees intuitively and spontaneously the thing to be done and the way to do it and intuitively and spontaneously fulfils itself in the act and the force,—taking up into that intuitive spontaneity of their truth, into its simple spiritual and supreme normality, the complexity of our forces of being and suffusing with their harmonised realities all the steps of Nature.” (CWSA 22: 1081–1082)

“In the conscious mind that which was still only a vital hunger in subconscious life, transforms itself into higher forms; hunger in the vital parts becomes craving of Desire in the mentalised life, straining of Will in the intellectual or thinking life. This movement of desire must and ought to continue until the individual has grown sufficiently so that he can now at last become master of himself and by increasing union with the Infinite possessor of his universe. … Meanwhile it has to progress from the type of a mutually devouring hunger to the type of a mutual giving, of an increasingly joyous sacrifice of interchange;—the individual gives himself to other individuals and receives them back in exchange; the lower gives itself to the higher and the higher to the lower so that they may be fulfilled in each other; the human gives itself to the Divine and the Divine to the human; the All in the individual gives itself to the All in the universe and receives its realised universality as a divine recompense. Thus the law of Hunger must give place progressively to the law of Love ...” (CWSA 21: 207)

“Love—the relative principle, not its absolute—is a principle of life, not of mind, but it can possess itself and move towards permanence only when taken up by the mind into its own light. What is called love in the body and the vital parts is mostly a form of hunger without permanence.” (CWSA 21: 216)

“Love itself at first obeys the law of hunger and enjoys the receiving and the exacting from others rather than the giving and surrendering to others which it admits chiefly as a necessary price for the thing that it desires. But here it has not yet attained to its true nature; its true law is to establish an equal commerce in which the joy of giving is equal to the joy of receiving and tends in the end to become even greater; but that is when it is shooting beyond itself under the pressure of the psychic flame to attain to the fulfilment of utter unity and has therefore to realise that which seemed to it not-self as an even greater and dearer self than its own individuality. In its life-origin, the law of love is the impulse to realise and fulfil oneself in others and by others, to be enriched by enriching, to possess and be possessed because without being possessed one does not possess oneself utterly.” (CWSA 21: 217)

XIII— Supramental Love

“There in the supramental Gnosis is the fulfilment, the culminating height, the all-embracing extent of the inner adoration, the profound and integral union, the flaming wings of Love upbearing the power and joy of a supreme Knowledge. For supramental Love brings an active ecstasy that surpasses the void passive peace and stillness which is the heaven of the liberated Mind and does not betray the deeper greater calm which is the beginning of the supramental silence. The unity of a love which is able to include in itself all differences without being diminished or abrogated by their present limitations and apparent dissonances is raised to its full potentiality on the supramental level. … The power of Love supramentalised can take hold of all living relations without hesitation or danger and turn them Godwards delivered from their crude, mixed and petty human settings and sublimated into the happy material of a divine life.” (CWSA 23: 168–169)

“And what will be the bliss nature when it manifests in a new supramental race? The fully evolved soul will be one with all beings in the status and dynamic effects of experience of a bliss-consciousness intense and illimitable. And since love is the effective power and soul-symbol of bliss-oneness he will approach and enter into this oneness by the gate of universal love, a sublimation of human love at first, a divine love afterwards, at its summits a thing of beauty, sweetness and splendour now to us inconceivable. He will be one in bliss-consciousness with all the world-play and its powers and happenings and there will be banished for ever the sorrow and fear, the hunger and pain of our poor and darkened mental and vital and physical existence. He will get that power of the bliss-freedom in which all the conflicting principles of our being shall be unified in their absolute values. All evil shall perforce change itself into good; the universal beauty of the All-beautiful will take possession of its fallen kingdoms; every darkness will be converted into a pregnant glory of light and the discords which the mind creates between Truth and Good and Beauty, Power and Love and Knowledge will disappear on the eternal summit, in the infinite extensions where they are always one.” (CWSA 23: 509–510)

XIV—Other Quotations on Love

“Let divine love be your goal.

Let pure love be your way.

Be always true to your love and all difficulties will be conquered.” (CWM 16: 213)

“Works of love: the best condition for work.” (CWM 14: 299)

“Our life ought to be governed by the Love for Truth and the thirst for Light.” (CWM 14: 190)

“Indeed, all life is love if we know how to live it.” (CWM 14: 132)

(Types of relationships[with the divine])

“The Lord and his Shakti

God and his devotee

The father and his child

The master and his disciple

The Beloved and Lover

The Friend and co-worker

The child and his mother.” (CWM 14: 22)

1. The secret of a mystic form of the Infinite which we can approach only through the ecstasy of the heart

“For there is, concealed behind individual love, obscured by its ignorant human figure, a mystery which the mind cannot seize, the mystery of the body of the Divine, the secret of a mystic form of the Infinite which we can approach only through the ecstasy of the heart and the passion of the pure and sublimated sense, and its attraction which is the call of the divine Flute-player, the mastering compulsion of the All-Beautiful, can only be seized and seize us through an occult love and yearning which in the end makes one the Form and the Formless, and identifies Spirit and Matter. It is that which the spirit in Love is seeking here in the darkness of the Ignorance and it is that which it finds when individual human love is changed into the love of the Immanent Divine incarnate in the material universe.” (CWSA 23: 160)

“The consciousness of one plane is different from the consciousness of another. Spiritual and psychic love are different from mental, vital or physical love—so with everything else.” (CWSA 30: 11)

“Q: Could a vision of the Mother or seeing her in dream or in waking be called a realisation?

A: That would be an experience rather than a realisation. A realisation would be of the Mother’s presence within, her force doing the work—or of the Peace or Silence everywhere, of universal Love, universal Beauty or Ananda etc. etc.” (CWSA 32: 276)

“The relation with the Divine, the relation with the Mother must be one of love, faith, trust, confidence, surrender ...” (CWSA 32: 450)

“What is our true relation with the Mother—the relation of the Mother and her child?

The relation of the child to the Mother is that of an entire, sincere and simple trust, love and dependence.” (CWSA 32: 448)

“Q: Do love and faith have the same meaning? I feel that where there is faith in the Mother, love is also there. Without the faith, there is no love; without the love, there is no faith. Am I right?

A: Not always. There are plenty of people who have some faith without love, though they may have a certain kind of mental bhakti, and plenty who have some love but no faith. But if it is the true psychic love, then faith goes with it, and if there is the entire faith, then the psychic love becomes soon awake.(CWSA 32: 466)

“Q: Speaking with X, I said: ‘Where there is faith in the Mother, there is love as well.’

A: You are right—if it is the soul’s faith, the soul’s love—but in some there is only a vital feeling and that brings, when it is disappointed, revolt and anger and they go away.” (CWSA 32: 466)

“Q: The Mother loves because she is Love and cannot but love. Still, we feel that she cannot love as we do, and on our part we cannot bear the constancy and wideness of her Love.

A: Obviously, if people expect the ordinary kind of love from the Mother they must be disappointed—the love based on the vital and its moods. But that is just the kind of love that has to be overpassed in Yoga or transformed into something else.” (CWSA 32: 480)

“As for the feelings about the Mother and that her love is only given for a return in work or to those who can do sadhana well, that is the usual senseless idea of the vital-physical mind and has no value.” (CWSA 32: 482)

“God who is essentially Sacchidananda, is in manifestation Satyam, Prema, Shakti, Truth, Strength and Love. Whatever is consistent with the truth and principle of things, whatever increases love among men, whatever makes for the strength of the individual, the nation and the race, is divine, it is the law of Vaivaswata Manu, it is the sanatana dharma and the Hindu shastra. Only, God is the triple harmony, He is not one-sided. Our love must not make us weak, blind or unwise; our strength must not make us hard and furious; our principles must not make us fanatical or sentimental. Let us think calmly, patiently, impartially; let us love wholly and intensely but wisely; let us act with strength, nobility and force.” (CWSA 12: 54)

“Human evolution rises through love and towards love. This truth is instinctively recognised by all the great religions, even when they cannot provide any philosophical justification for a tenet to which they nevertheless attach the highest importance. The one law of Christianity which replaces all the commandments is to love one’s neighbour as oneself, the moral ideal of Buddhism is selfless benevolence & beneficence to others; the moral ideal of Hinduism is the perfect sage whose delight and occupation is the good of all creatures …. It is always the same great ideal expressed with varying emphasis. But love in the sense which religion attaches to the word, depends on the realization of oneself in others. ... A separate individual Self will live its own life, pursue its own gratification or its own salvation; it can have no ground, no impulse to love another as itself, because it cannot feel that the other is itself. The Vedanta provides in the realisation of a single Self and the illusory character of all division the only real explanation of this higher or spiritual love.” (CWSA 17: 186-187)

“By renouncing enjoyment you can increase your enjoyment a hundredfold. That was ever the privilege of the true lover. If you are [a] true lover of a woman, it is her joys far more than your own that make your happiness; if you are a true lover of your friends, their prosperity and radiant faces will give you a delight which you could never have found in your own small and bounded pleasures; if you are a true lover of your nation, the joy, glory and wealth of all its millions will be yours; if you are a true lover of mankind, all the joys of the countless millions of the earth will flow like an ocean of nectar through your soul.” The Meaning of Renunciation (CWSA 17: 188-189)

“To see oneself in others is impossible without completely identifying oneself with others; a perfect sympathy is essential and perfect sympathy brings with it perfect love, perfect charity and forgiveness, perfect pity for sin and suffering, perfect tolerance, a universal benevolence with its counterpart in action universal beneficence.” (CWSA 17: 282)

“According to the writer of the Gita, this was not a new movement, but a return to a past and lost discipline; for Sri Krishna says to Arjuna of the true or sajnan karmamarga he reveals to him, “This is the imperishable Yoga I declared unto Vivaswan, Vivaswan revealed it to Manu and Manu to Ixvacu told it. Thus was it known to the royal sages by hereditary transmission, till by the great lapse of time this yoga was lost, O scourge of thy foes. This is the same ancient Yoga that I have told unto [thee] today, because thou art my lover and my friend; for this is the highest of all the inner truths.” (CWSA 18: 263)

2. Opening of the upper lotus proceeds by a surrender when our love and trust are complete and our whole being lies in the clasp of perfect love and wisdom

“When the other upper lotus opens, the whole mind becomes full of a divine light, joy and power, behind which is the Divine, the Lord of our being on his throne with our soul beside him or drawn inward into his rays; all the thought and will become then a luminosity, power and ecstasy; in communication with the Transcendent, this can pour down towards our mortal members and flow by them outwards on the world. In this dawn too there are, as the Vedic mystics knew, our alternations of its day and night, our exiles from the light; but as we grow in the power to hold this new existence, we become able to look long on the sun from which this irradiation proceeds and in our inner being we can grow one body with it. Sometimes the rapidity of this change depends on the strength of our longing for the Divine thus revealed, and on the intensity of our force of seeking; but at others it proceeds rather by a passive surrender to the rhythms of his all-wise working which acts always by its own at first inscrutable method. But the latter becomes the foundation when our love and trust are complete and our whole being lies in the clasp of a Power that is perfect love and wisdom.” (CWSA 24: 596-597)

3. A universal spiritual Presence grows upon us by our love

“The Divine reveals himself in the world around us when we look upon that with a spiritual desire of delight that seeks him in all things. There is often a sudden opening by which the veil of forms is itself turned into a revelation. A universal spiritual Presence, a universal peace, a universal infinite Delight has manifested, immanent, embracing, all-penetrating. This Presence by our love of it, our delight in it, our constant thought of it returns and grows upon us; it becomes the thing that we see and all else is only its habitation, form and symbol. Even all that is most outward, the body, the form, the sound, whatever our senses seize, are seen as this Presence; they cease to be physical and are changed into a substance of spirit. This transformation means a transformation of our own inner consciousness; we are taken by the surrounding Presence into itself and we become part of it. Our own mind, life, body become to us only its habitation and temple, a form of its working and an instrument of its self-expression. All is only soul and body of this delight.” (CWSA 24: 597)

“It is always a mistake to attach importance to what others say— it is enough to have true devotion and the right attitude towards the Mother. You need have no apprehension of this kind at all.” (CWSA 32: 477)

“Mother, in spite of my thousand and three imperfections, this one sense remains in me—that you are my mother, that I am born from your heart. It is the only truth I seem to have realised in all these six years, but I thank you very much that I have been enabled to feel this much at least.

A: It is an excellent foundation for the other truths that are to come —for they all result from it.” (CWSA 32: 478)

“Do not allow mental anxiety to harass you. Wait on the working of the Mother’s force which will open the lotus of the heart. In the light from above devotion will blossom in you.” (CWSA 32: 478)

“The meaning was simply that these are the conditions for the realisation in the Yoga—devotion, faith in Divine help, resolution, mental sincerity, peace in the vital—if these are there, the realisation will come.” (CWSA 32: 556)

“Q: Up till now, I have not recognised the divinity of anyone except Sri Krishna. I have looked on the Mother as a Guru who can take me to him. But now something in me wants to hold the Mother fast as divinity. I can’t keep her out of my mind, nor can I reject Sri Krishna. The more I think, the more I am perplexed. I pray for your help.

A: This struggle in you (between bhakti for Sri Krishna and the sense of the divinity of the Mother) is quite unnecessary; for the two things are one and go perfectly together. It is he who has brought you to the Mother and it is by adoration of her that you will realise him. He is here in the Asram and it is his work that is being done here.” (CWSA 32: 337)

“First aspire and pray to the Mother for quiet in the mind, purity, calm and peace, an awakened consciousness, intensity of devotion, strength and spiritual capacity to face all inner and outer difficulties and go through to the end of the Yoga. If the consciousness awakens and there is devotion and intensity of aspiration, it will be possible for the mind, provided it learns quietude and peace, to grow in knowledge.” (CWSA 29: 142–143)

“But none of these things— development, perfection or siddhi—can really come in any degree of completeness or unmixed finality until this ego-centric attitude changes into the God-centric, until it becomes the development, perfection, siddhi of the Divine Consciousness, its will and its instrumentation in this body—and that can only be when these things become secondary, and bhakti for the Divine, love for the Divine, oneness with the Divine in consciousness, will, heart and body, become the sole aim ...” (CWSA 31: 229)

“These things [the sex-impulse in all its forms] are a degradation of the source in the being from which bhakti, divine love and adoration arise.” (CWSA 31: 511)

Q: What is the Divine?

A: The Divine is what you adore in Sri Aurobindo.” (CWM 13: 27)

“How beautiful is the day when one can offer one’s devotion to Sri Aurobindo.” (CWM 13: 27)

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